


Interrogatives?—Season 2

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Interrogatives? [2]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 21,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28767843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: So. Yeah. I completely broke up with the show and then . . . pandemic? And the worst semester of my life? And general world on fire? In any case, I watched through the series again and did a story per episode, just as I did with Dialogic, and then with Object Lessons. So each chapter is an independent, episode-based story. It will take me a while to get these posted, but there are another 151 stories and I'll divvy them up by season.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Interrogatives? [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096184
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	1. Newsflash—Deep in Death (2 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is not at all used to getting her news from the news. She’s a cop. She knows cop-relevant things long before they have any spin on them, and most of the time she only bothers with the news for background noise on the rare occasions she’s home early enough to be getting ready for bed while it’s on. 

> _“Was it awful? Were you scared?”  
> _ _— Alexis Castle, Deep in Death (2 x 01)_

* * *

She is not at all used to getting her news from the news. She’s a cop. She knows cop-relevant things long before they have any spin on them, and most of the time she only bothers with the news for background noise on the rare occasions she’s home early enough to be getting ready for bed while it’s on. 

This is not most of the time. The chyrons and social media feeds all light up at once, thanks to the fact that _Cosmo_ Amy is on board when a team of masked men strike: _BODY-JACKED—Best-selling Richard Castle injured!_ It’s chaos at the crime scene. Fans and looky-loos swarm the uniforms at the tape line, cell phones raised to catch a snippet of absolutely nothing. 

It’s chaos back at the precinct, too, apparently. The Captain’s voice in her ear is clipped and as close to genuinely unhappy as he tends to get with her, _“Once we get a handle on what actually happened, I’ll be very interested to hear how Castle and that reporter wound up in in that van in the first place, Detective.”_

She doesn’t have an answer, and he doesn’t wait for one. She feels a hot rush of shame that can’t quite thaw the icy fury that’s kept her upright these last few months without _this_ , without him underfoot every second of her life. She wants someone to hear her protest—her untimely wail that he wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near her ever again. 

Her phone rings again. It’s Lanie this time and shame might just win the day. She hasn’t had a minute to worry about her friend. She’s spent them all feeling aggrieved, wasting energy on him when she swore to herself she wouldn’t. 

_“Writer boy and I are fine, I think. Quite a bump on the noggin, but he’s walking and talking and worrying about his hair.”_ She hears his voice in the background, protesting the dig. She hears the exasperation of the poor cop trying to take his statement. “ _Miss Thing was belted in the front. Think she was working that phone before the tires finished bouncing.”_

Lanie’s tone is blasé as ever, but Beckett can hear the slight quaver that tells her that _Cosmo_ spin or no, her friend has been through an ordeal. _He_ has been through an ordeal that she had a hand in, and it’s all over the news. 

“Good,” she blurts. “Lain. It’s good. I’m glad you’re—you are all—okay. Listen.” She stops. She has to stop and gather herself up. “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a call to make.” 

She does have a call to make. She twists in place, taking in the still-swarming scene. It’s tempting to tell herself that she should wait for a quiet place—that even in the confines of her car the sheer volume of the crowd will undermine the whole damned thing. But it’s an excuse, and shame is winning tonight. 

She dials the landline number from memory. It’s not in her contacts anymore. She’d expunged him in another tiny energy bleed. It rings one and a half times and it’s Martha who answers. Her voice, pitched low and perfectly modulated lands some kind of blow. It … disrupts that rigid, icy framework. She feels a series of fractures running through her and an enormous sense of loss. She cannot find her own voice for a long string of thumping heartbeats. 

“Martha.” She finally lands on the name and finds herself at an immediate impasse. “It’s Beckett. It’s Kate Beckett.” She stares down at the palm this woman has pressed so many times in welcome. She feels the warmth of her smile and the sharp absence of it all these months. “I’m not sure if you’ve seen the news.” 

_“The news?”_ Martha’s voice rises in alarm. _“Why Alexis is just now showing me—“_

“He’s fine,” she cuts in. “Castle–Rick. I know the news says … but he’s fine.” 

_“You’re sure? These tweeters seem to think . . ”_ she trails off. Kate can hear Alexis in the background. She pictures the girl scrolling through an escalating series. 

“I spoke—“ She’d like to leave the lie alone. It’s the faintest twist of the truth and she’d like to leave it there, but the night, the ordeal, the whole damned situation won’t let her. “Dr. Parish is with him. The reporter—“ 

_“Oh, that_ awful _reporter.”_ She pictures Martha’s flamboyant gestures. She envisions her winding an arm around Alexis’s shoulders and gently easing the phone from the girl’s hand. _“This is_ her _doing, isn’t it?”_

“No,” she says all in a rush. Shame wins, but fury hits back. Loss and hurt lick around the edges of everything like flames. “It’s mine, Martha. My doing.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is way not a thing—like especially super not a thing. I have always wondered about that phone call. I dislike this engagement with that phone call. Because it’s not a thing. 


	2. Headway—The Double Down (2 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is trying not to wear out his welcome. His re-admission? Whichever. He’s trying not to wear it out. 

> _“Where have you been?”_   
>  _— Kate Beckett, The Double Down (2 x 02)_
> 
> * * *

He is trying not to wear out his welcome. His re-admission? Whichever. He’s trying not to wear it out. 

It goes against the grain for him. He is an all-in person, in general. He is, though it troubles him to admit it (so he doesn’t, for the most part), all-in when it comes to her. That, paradoxically, is why he’s trying not to wear out his welcome. His re-welcome? Whichever. 

It’s not that she has him on notice or anything. She is, in her own way, an all-in person. There have been no half measures from her in accepting his apology, in taking him back. But he suspects that this, in turn, puts the onus on him to give her space—to recognize and honor her boundaries—and it goes against the grain. 

But he’s trying. He holds off on bounding back to the precinct, un-summoned, after the case with the Highsmith twist. The complexities of the intertwined murders coupled with the demands of trash-talking Ryan and Esposito had resulted in them all pulling some serious overtime. And after so much togetherness, he figures it’s wise to make himself scarce for a bit. 

He’s inclined to sulk about it. He grumbles to himself that _before_ he showed up, un-summoned, all the time. But it’s not _before_ anymore. That’s the point. Still, it’s hard. He bangs around his office, getting nothing done. He’s frustrated by the fact that his sacrifice is a negative—an absence—and as such, it will go completely unsung. It’s childish—and not in the good way—but he feels vaguely like someone should show up to give him a gold star for his self-restraint. 

The trouble isn’t _just_ that hanging back is not his style. The trouble is _also_ that he thinks there’s something new between them that requires care and feeding. He feels like they’ve gotten closer in this little while since he apologized—since she called after him _See you tomorrow_. 

There are all these tiny approaches she has made that he doesn’t think she would have a few months ago. There’s a warmth to her tone, even when she’s cutting him down to size, that he’s pretty sure he’s not imagining. He’s pretty sure.

In the abstract, on the character level, in the writer part of his brain, he understands how this shift in their relationship might have come to pass: A relationship, once tested, emerges stronger, deeper closer. In the not abstract, on the human-beings-are-dumb level, in the hey-pal-your-relationship-track-record-sucks part of his brain, that’s not how it works at all. A relationship, once tested, implodes dramatically, messily, publicly. 

But it seems here that both things might be true. Lord knows her walking away from him, mid-sentence, in the hospital was dramatic. Lord knows he was a hot, undignified mess in the early days afterward. For a long while afterward. And Lord knows it was painfully public knowledge that Richard Castle was no longer haunting the Halls of Justice. 

And yet, here they are, closer for that terrible estrangement, he’s pretty sure, and he doesn’t want to lose that. He doesn’t want to give either of them the chance to draw back into themselves, into the land of implosion and self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is where he lands one evening a few days after that Highsmith twist. He pulls himself out of his sulk. He checks his watch and makes an educated guess that she’s at the precinct, that her dinner, if she has one, will come from the vending machine. He makes the executive decision that this is not okay. 

He picks up Thai food on a whim. He extrapolates from her favorite Chinese order and gambles on a few things that he really likes from this place—a few things he wants to know if _she’ll_ like, and the whole endeavor is surprisingly nerve-wracking. He has to … assemble himself in the elevator. He has to channel his very best Martha Rodgers to tamp down the stupid butterflies darting around inside him. 

The elevator doors open. She’s there, bent over her desk, with only the gooseneck lamp for illumination. He is glad enough to see her that he’s sure, suddenly, that his gladness will be too much. He’s sure there’s a line he’s about to topple over and absolutely sure that he should withdraw. 

It’s too late, though. She senses his presence, even though she’s oblivious to everything else, up to and including the fact that her end of the bullpen is pretty much a ghost town. 

“Castle!” she says, and there’s an exclamation point, not a question mark. There’s a tucked away, underneath smile. He’s pretty sure there is. 

He sweeps toward her desk. There’s nothing else for it. 

“You haven’t eaten,” he declares as he dramatically produces the bag of takeout. He fixes her with the Dad glare that has never been effective on anyone, ever. “You _will_ eat.” 

He intends to leave it at that. Exclamation point and smile notwithstanding, he’s pretty sure he’s deep into _too much_ territory, and there seems to be nothing to do but play it up—to swan out of there as flamboyantly as he swanned in. He turns to do just that, but her voice stops him. 

“You’re not going to?” He turns back and the gooseneck lamp spills her secret. There’s color in her cheeks. “Eat, I mean.” 

“You’re busy.” He gestures to the paperwork filling her desk.

“I’m not—“ The folders fanned across her blotter pull her up short for a moment, but she powers through the moment. A stubborn wrinkle appears between her brows. She makes a tiny approach, “Not _so_ busy. And you always get, like, _way_ too much food. You could …” She glances toward the chair that’s become a fixture at the end of her desk. 

He takes the hint. He grabs the opportunity, gladly. “I could stay.”   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This remains thing-less. THING. LESS. 


	3. Hip To—Inventing the Girl (2 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is unnecessarily furtive at the newsstand. It’s really just a coincidence and a happy accident of the weather she is not actually wearing one of her many trench coats, but it hardly matters. She is spiritually wearing a trench coat. She is being unnecessarily furtive. 

> _You got something you want to share with the class?  
>  — Richard Castle, Inventing the Girl (2 x 03)_
> 
> * * *

She is unnecessarily furtive at the newsstand. It’s really just a coincidence and a happy accident of the weather she is not actually wearing one of her many trench coats, but it hardly matters. She is spiritually wearing a trench coat. She is being unnecessarily furtive. 

“Can I have a bag, please?” she asks. She has to make a conscious effort to speak above a whisper. The old man behind the counter gives the purse slung over her shoulder a judgmental look. It’s more than oversized enough to hold one stupid magazine, but that’s not the point. “A _bag_ ,” she repeats, this time in the kind of slow, loud English she’s in the habit of judging bond traders and soccer moms harshly for. 

Her change and the purchase she’s quite obviously ashamed of come over the counter to her without so much as the gruff _You have a nice day, lady,_ she usually gets. The bag, as it turns out, is as pointless as every other part of her nonsensical attempt to keep this on the down low. The plastic is practically transparent, and the whole thing is too short by a lot. The bag, in fact, is worse than pointless—it leaves Richard Castle’s stupid, glossy head sticking right out the top. 

Her nervous breakdown proceeds apace as she heads into the precinct. She stops safely around the corner and looks around like she’s an extra in a _Baby’s First Stakeout_ video to be sure her newly minted newsstand nemesis hasn’t followed her to be sure she’s not wasting the bag. She wastes the bag and stuffs the magazine in her purse, after all. 

Via an almost supernatural set of circumstances, she scores a seat on the subway—a single, rear-facing seat that’s mostly shielded from the rest of the car. The purse resting across her thighs is heavy with temptation. The new and eminently hate-able part of her, just born this morning, wants badly to slide the magazine free and take at least a preliminary peek at the article she has been loudly not caring about one little bit for weeks now. 

With two stops to go, she gives in. She sort of gives in. She slides his stupid, glossy head out of the bag and awkwardly riffles her thumb over pages until she finds the beginning of the article and the second version of his stupid, glossy head. She reads the headline, the pull quote, and the first few sentences of the article itself upside down. 

It’s those first few sentences that pull he up short. She reads and re-reads. She almost misses her stop. As it is, she has to shove her way through a car that has gotten crowded without her noticing. She has to fight her way out on to the platform, almost blind with rage. 

  
Puff Piece Amy has read the book. Puff Piece Amy has read _her_ fucking book. 

She’s livid enough that she wants to call Lanie. She’s livid enough that she wants to call her dad and have a deeply uncharacteristic good cry. She’s livid enough that she wishes she had a big brother who would beat up Richard Castle and his stupid glossy head. 

But she doesn’t call Lanie. She doesn’t call her dad. She doesn’t fire up Craigslist to see what the going rate for violent big brothers for hire might be. She goes about her business like the damned professional that she is. Emphasis on the damned. 

She’s short tempered with the uniforms who, honestly, are doing a pretty good job at the impossible task of maintaining a perimeter in such a high-profile location. She pointedly ignores the boys and their back-and-forth chatter and more or less tells him—stupid, glossy-headed _him_ —to shut up. 

It’s an upsetting snowball at first. She’s livid and utterly failing to mask it, which makes her more livid. But then no one seems to notice. Lanie casts a sidelong look when it turns out Castle has correctly called their vic’s profession and likely her penultimate location, but it’s clear she thinks it’s simply business as usual between the two of them. The boys are oblivious, and it’s an irritating ouroboros that no one seems to notice that she’s irritated. No one thinks to ask about the magazine she’s pointedly, uncharacteristically left spread open in the middle of her desk. 

The morning passes like that. There’s a red alert moment with _Rina_ when she comes within half a breath of ripping the magazine from the girl’s hands and setting it on fire right there. And the thing about that is … he notices. Even as he awkwardly tries to make time with Rina and her feral eyelashes—even as he tweaks her about the magazine—she can see the wheels in his head turning. She can see him sneaking nervous glances as as they interview Sierra Goodwin and wince their way through Travis McBoyd’s recitation of the ways the NYPD had already failed his wife by the time she was murdered. 

_He_ notices the magazine on her desk, and she thinks nastily to herself that of course he’d notice his own stupid, glossy head. And it’s not like there isn’t truth in that. It’s not as though he isn’t really, truly proud as a peacock, as usual. But he takes the bait, too, when she calls it fluff, and that’s not an accident. He moves the conversation from himself to her and the flattering portrait of her Puff Piece Amy has apparently painted. 

She wouldn’t know, and she doesn’t care what Puff Piece Amy did or did not say about her. She cares that Puff Piece Amy is in a position to weigh in on the authenticity of his portrayal of police procedure, and she is not, because unlike Puff Piece Amy, she hasn’t read her own damned book, and that pisses her off. 

It upsets her. 

And he’s the only one who seems to notice.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Deeply unthing-y; and meta. Is Beckett aware that she has a trench coat problem? Is there a trench coat 12-step program? 


	4. Acroamatic—Fool Me Once (2 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has to watch his language around her. Not in a swear-jar kind of way—although for that particular sin, she’s not above shooting him a schoolmarmish glare that’s unnervingly attractive should he slip within earshot of the bereaved and/or the press when they’re out at a scene. But day-to-day, minute-to-minute, he has to watch himself so that he doesn’t slip into the whine of a dorky seventh grader the cool kids are picking on. 

> _“Hormones, what’s your excuse?”  
>  _ _— Martha Rodgers, Fool Me Once (2 x 04)_

* * *

He has to watch his language around her. Not in a swear-jar kind of way—although for that particular sin, she’s not above shooting him a schoolmarmish glare that’s unnervingly attractive should he slip within earshot of the bereaved and/or the press when they’re out at a scene. But day-to-day, minute-to-minute, he has to watch himself so that he doesn’t slip into the whine of a dorky seventh grader the cool kids are picking on. 

It’s not really fair to say she _picks_ on him. Or, rather, she totally picks on him, every second of his existence, and when she does, he fixes her with the smug look of a man who knows that whip-smart taunts and wicked insults are her love language. And, thus, he gets his own back, and the picking on each other part of their relationship is going just swimmingly, thank you for asking. 

It’s when she lies to him that he’s most gravely in danger of reverting to Richard Rodgers: The Dork Ages. It’s when he’s desperate to know something about her—not about the job, not about procedure, but about _her_ —and she obfuscates and omits. She arches one eyebrow and lets him fill in the blanks as he will, smiling all the while. It’s when she gives the haughtiest of haughty laughs at the very idea that she’d spend an evening alone with his book and call it a hot date. That’s when he really has to watch his language, because it could be true, it could be laughable, it could be anywhere in between. How should he know? 

Well, he _should_ know, because he’s written an entire damned book based on her that she might or might not have read, she might or might not be reading, she might or might not be using to level the legs of a wobbly coffee table in the gingerbread palace that she lives in, high in the sky over Manhattan. And that’s the problem. He’s written an entire damned book and a lot of the time, he’s not sure if it’s a terrific lie to say that it’s based on her. 

The wild uncertainty of it all is partly an artifact of her job. It’s partly an artifact of his. She, for a living, diverts conversation along the channels most relevant to her interests. She picks up on the way a person perceives her in a given moment and uses it to her advantage. She plays whatever role is most likely to remove her from the equation entirely, because it’s her job to get the details, the confession, the story. 

That’s theoretically his job, too. The story. It’s what he’s told her he was there for since the beginning, but when it comes to her, he might be failing. Or he might not be. How should he know? 

She might have left him and the boys going through Steven Fletcher’s cons so she could nip off to a crazy sex party, to a Thunderdome-style ballroom dance competition, to a quilting bee. She might love con movies, or rom coms, or Japanese tentacle porn. She could make any one of those claims with a straight face, then deny it the next second, and he’d have no idea which to believe. He’d have little recourse but to unleash dork whine to end all dork whines. 

It’s ludicrous that it bothers him. What she does or doesn’t do, what she likes or doesn’t like—none of it should have the power to send him a quarter century into his own past, because none of it should matter. In his sulkier moments, he reminds himself that it _doesn’t_ , not one bit. The facts of any case—of any character or crime science—are generally boring. The real world is, as a rule, in dire need of punch up, and he’s just the man to do it. 

Kate Beckett is a reference photo for Nikki Heat. She is a point of departure for a character of his creation, and his creation is a a damned good one. So it’s fine if deflection is her avocation. It’s fine if two ballroom dancers enter, one ballroom dancer leaves—although that would be a hell of a B-plot. 

It doesn’t matter what she’s really like. That’s what he tells himself when he’s had to bite his tongue for the five hundredth time in ten minutes, because she keeps telling him lies or truths or _whatever_. It doesn’t matter, because he’s gotten his story. 

_That_ truth should be salve to his wounded, dorky soul, but it’s not. He doesn’t believe himself anymore than he can believe her nine, times out of ten. It does matter. It’s always mattered. He’s not just there for the story. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Castle can find out no things. There are no things here or anywhere. 


	5. Congé—When the Bough Breaks (2 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The party is in full swing, not that anyone would know it from the blast radius that has opened up around her at one end of the bar. The blast radius is a recent development. It’s a work in progress, given the surprising number of men who would like to buy her a drink. Here. At an open bar. 

> _“What exactly was the nature of your relationship with this woman?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, When the Bough Breaks (2 x 05)_

* * *

The party is in full swing, not that anyone would know it from the blast radius that has opened up around her at one end of the bar. The blast radius is a recent development. It’s a work in progress, given the surprising number of men who would like to buy her a drink. Here. At an open bar. 

It’s a line for some—either swagger or an ill-advised attempt at charm. For others it’s nerves or cluelessness or some combination of the two. Regardless of their angle of approach it’s evidence of a death wish for every last one of them. Every last one of them eventually figures that out, though some get closer to wish fulfillment than others. 

She is not keeping her promise, despite achieving her blast radius, despite the slow but steady stream of better-than-average complimentary liquor. She is not enjoying the party. She’s not even sure why she’s still _at_ the party. 

She has made her flashbulb-illuminated entrance. She has greeted the man of the hour, near a picturesque stack of books, no less, sparking off another, marginally more discrete, set of _pop-pop-pop-pops._ She has let an allowed a decent interval to elapse, and on his last, very brief drive-by, the Captain had mumbled a _job well done_ in her general direction 

_Job well done._

She feels the music traveling up through the floor and the bass in her chest. She hears snatches of gushing conversation from people who probably haven’t even read the blurbs on the book jacket yet. She sees, in her peripheral vision, a sea of beautiful people in expensive clothes, all dressed up to celebrate Nikki Heat. 

She could take it as her cue to make good her escape. She could be off this uncomfortable barstool, out of this roaring, crowded space with the irregular _pop, pop, pop_ of camera flashes. She could be done with clumsy, unwelcome advances. She could find a side door to duck out of and be done, it seems, with this entire unwanted, uncomfortable stretch of her life. She could be _done._

She senses someone entering the blast radius. A body approaching that absorbs some of the relentless sound. 

“Gotta warn you,” she says without looking up from the Olympic condensation rings she’s making on the bar top. “You’re the tenth punch on my _Can I buy you a drink_ card.”

“Ryan sent me to save you from yourself.” Lanie slides on to the stool next to her and summons a bartender, already holding a generous pour of red wine, from the ether. “Javi said we should hang back and sell tickets to whatever’s like to happen to lucky number ten.”

Kate ripples the surface of her bourbon with something like a laugh. She’s braced for a Lanie Lecture—or maybe for small talk about the party, about the book, about the betting pool surrounding Castle’s eventual _Chests Autographed_ total for the evening, but it doesn’t come. None of it comes. Lanie sips her wine, at ease inside the blast radius. She says nothing. 

“He’s doing another book. A different book. Three of them.” She makes some headway on her drink at last. Lanie waits her out. “He’s going.” 

“Ah.” Lanie takes a sip of her wine. “So _that’s_ it.” 

“What?” She rounds on her. “ _What’s_ ‘it’?”

“Your boy’s going,” she makes a gestures toward the open floor where Castle must be mingling, “and that’s got you feeling some kind of way—” 

“Some _kind_ of—“ she’s on the verge of a blow up that would definitely drive ticket sales. She realizes now that she’s been on the verge of it all through the blast radius hours, but Lanie fixes her with a mild look. 

“It’s not what you expected,” she says as she sets down her wine glass and slides off the stool. She permits herself an exasperated eye roll. “What _ever_ you expected—what’s going on in that head right now isn’t it. So come on.” 

“Come on where?” Kate warily sets down her drink. 

“Somewhere else.” Lanie waves off the specifics. She turns and heads for the door. “Gotta be a decent dive bar, even in this part of town.” 

“We’ll—“ She trails off. She stops and looks down at her shoes against the red carpet. She casts a glance back at the picturesque stack of books with a feeling that’s as likely to be regret as it is relief. “We’ll have to pay for our own drinks.” 

“Girl, look at you.” Lanie pops one hip and plants her fist on it. She gestures to herself from plunging neckline to tantalizingly short hemline. “Hell, look at me.” She shakes her head and resumes the march out of the damned party, muttering, “Pay for our own drinks. Please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well this thing (not a thing) wouldn’t go where I thought it would go. It is the way of not things. 


	6. Bushwhacked—Vampire Weekend (2 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is not prepared for her sudden interest in him. It’s a strange thing to think. A strange thing to say out loud, and he does say it out loud to his mirror as part of a pep talk—an unexpected, yet necessary intention for the day: Be prepared. Kate Beckett, master interrogator, is suddenly interested. 

> _“It’s not what’s there, it’s what’s not-there?”  
> _ _— Alexis Castle, Vampire Weekend (2 x 06)_

* * *

He is not prepared for her sudden interest in him. It’s a strange thing to think. A strange thing to say out loud, and he does say it out loud to his mirror as part of a pep talk—an unexpected, yet necessary intention for the day: _Be prepared. Kate Beckett, master interrogator, is suddenly interested._

It’s a strange thing. On the one hand, they’ve known each other for months, so how can it be sudden? On the other hand, she is the sole student in an accelerated doctoral program with a concentration in not being interested in him, so it’s totally the sudden-est. 

It’s also a wrong thing. She is supposed to be interested in the fabulous parties he throws. Their game of suggestive one-upmanship is supposed to culminate in both of them getting something interesting pierced, then having satisfying slutty-nurse sex in the Phantasmagorium back room, because Dr. Barry is a friend who would totally do him a solid like that. _That_ ' _s_ the kind of interest she’s supposed to be showing. 

But she might not even be coming to his fabulous party, and it seems like slutty-nurse sex is a definite no for the moment. It seems that she wants to know the story instead— _his_ story—and he is utterly unprepared or that. 

He supposes that’s strange, too. If he had not spent the last decade-plus conditioning himself away from introspection, he’d probably find it strange that piercing and PVC-featuring sex chronologically precede basic getting-to-know-you questions like _hey, how’d you end up doing what you do?_ But he _has_ spent the last decade-plus conditioning himself away from introspection, so in his world—which, by the way, has great parties and top-shelf back room sex—she’s the one who’s off script. 

And all the same, he almost tells her. When she turns the conversation about Vixen and Crow and whose lover is whose right around on him, the whole bottled-up story very nearly comes spilling out. It’s only Ryan and Esposito, who demolish moments with a regularity envied by the tides, who stand between him and a full confession of things he has not spoken of in a lifetime, and he’s definitely not prepared for that. 

He has never—not once in a quarter of a century—had the urge to tell any one. He has answered the question she’s asking literally a thousand times in contexts ranging from intimate to international and nothing like the truth has ever bubbled up until now. Until her and her strange and sudden need to know. 

He’s not prepared for her persistence, either. He keeps expecting her interest in the bedrock of his life story to snap off like a stiff switch on a goosenecked lamp. He fully expects her attention to turn to teasing him about every embarrassing detail about the Morlock incident, but it turns out she’s a multitasker. She’s fully capable of doing an unflattering, Queen of the Night–defying imitation of his girly scream one minute, then earnestly prodding him for backstory parity the next. 

He is not proud of his fabrication in the end. (Except she falls for it, hard, and maybe he’s a _little_ proud of that.) In keeping with the liar’s best practices, he hews as close to the truth as he dares. He shaves some years off his age, but he sets the story against the patternless backdrop of school holidays. He calls up the memory of wandering alone, of no one missing him. 

  
It’s a boy lying there, a young boy, not a woman. He doesn’t know it will be that way until the words are all ready out there, tugging her in closer and closer still. He doesn’t know that the blood will make an appearance, blood he couldn’t banish from his mind’s eye through all the days and nights of wintry rain that followed in the real story. 

He’s unprepared for how much, in the end, he _does_ tell her, after a fashion. It’s enough that he’s shaken beneath the smirk and the suave _until we meet again._ He’s stirred up—unpleasantly so—all through the party, all through its winding down to just their tight-knit little precinct group, to just her, because she insists on staying to help draw order out of chaos. 

She insists, and he’s unprepared. He’s awkward and jumpy around her. She is quiet and a shade cool to him. She’s mad about the made-up story, even though she said they were even. She’s interested and she’s mad that he’s holding out. 

“I don’t talk about it,” he blurts when she’s literally on the verge of going. 

He’s holding her coat and she’s trying to figure out if she’s going to let him help her on with it or strangle him with the sleeves for trying. Her hands drop to her sides, leaving him in an awkward pose somewhere between matador and a guy selling knockoff Ray Bans out of his trench coat somewhere way off Canal. 

“I’ve never talked to anyone about it. Ever.” 

“Ever,” she repeats. She turns to face him. She holds one hand out for the coat. She slips her arms into it and buttons up, unassisted. “Okay, Castle.” 

She nods once, and then she’s gone. She’s not mad anymore. She’s still interested. And he is utterly unprepared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Negative space. The absence of Thing. 


	7. Destination Anywhere—Famous Last Words (2 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a long, strange series of events that has led to this moment—to something that seems suspiciously like an ice cream date, late on a school night, with Richard Castle. He doesn’t think it’s strange. He has not found it strange at any point along the way. 

> _“Do you wanna know a secret?”  
>  — Sky Blue, Famous Last Words (2 x 07)_

* * *

It’s a long, strange series of events that has led to this moment—to something that seems suspiciously like an ice cream date, late on a school night, with Richard Castle. He doesn’t think it’s strange. He has not found it strange at any point along the way. 

“Why _wouldn’t_ she send you tickets?”

That had been the first stop in the strange series, a few weeks back. The envelope, the hand-written note had taken her completely by surprise. And there he was, perplexed and offering an off-hand question. And there she’d been, too tongue-tied to answer. She’d felt too silly when it had come down to her apparent belief in the utterly closed nature of Famous-Person-to-Famous-Person. If Sky Blue was going to send a block of hard-to-get tickets to an intimate show honoring her sister, he’d be the obvious candidate, right? 

It’s the kind of logic one would expect from someone whose bedroom decor still leaned heavily on _Bop_ and _Tiger Beat_ fold-outs. She’d realized that almost as soon as she’d wondered aloud— _Me? Why would she send them to_ me?—though she mercifully managed to keep the teenage workings of her mind mostly to herself. Mostly, but he’d picked up on some of it, somehow.

“You’re the one who solved her sister’s murder.” He’d fixed her with that odd, searching look of his. “And even before that, getting her to the hospital? Getting her through those first few hours? You were—“ He’d shaken his head, cleared his throat, caught up in the difficult memory of it. “Of course she’s grateful.”

At the second strange stop, he’d remembered. She’d agonized over bringing it up. She’d rehearsed a dozen casual reminders and offhand offers to pass her own ticket on to one of Alexis’s friends. She’d written and rewritten her dialogue on the way into work for days upon days, and never had the courage to launch even one scenario. She’d composed a dozen texts, and backspaced over each one. And then he been the one to remember. He’d flopped his elbows on the edge of her desk with _T-_ minus two days to go. 

“What are you wearing? Should we match, or is that dorky?” he’d asked, chin propped on his fists. “And do you think I I can pull off blue extensions? Alexis says no. Mother says no. But I bet them that you’d be a yes.” 

He’d remembered, and the offer to give up her ticket had somehow died on the tip of her tongue. It had gotten lost in her refusal to pay him a dollar if he went for the extensions, in her refusal try the extensions herself for the same price. 

She’s not sure how to number the strange stops from there. It might be that number three is him and Alexis and Martha come calling for her at the precinct so they could pile into a taxi together, the four of them chattering the whole way as though they hadn’t seen each other in months—as though she doesn’t see him all the damned time, and she doesn’t see the two ladies of his house on a strangely regular basis. 

That would make the concert itself stop number four, with its melodramatic candlelight and surprisingly moving intimacy. But then the question is, is this stop five, swiveling on a red-topped stool with her elbows flopped on a marble ice cream parlor counter with no red-headed chaperones in sight? Is this something wholly apart from the school night out that they’d planned, that he hd remembered, that he had made certain of by coming with his mother and his daughter to collect her, so she couldn’t bow out? 

She contemplates the question as she pulls hard on the straw, doing her level best to make progress on the ultra-thick chocolate malt in the tall glass before her. She asks herself how likely it is that he slipped Alexis some amount of cash way north of a dollar to yawn and mutter about a trigonometry test. She theorizes that Martha’s price for evaporating into thin air with her granddaughter in tow—if, indeed, she exacted one—must have been still further north of _that_. 

She considers the possibilities and tries to count the strange stops. She wonders until she’s full of chocolate malt and a little on the sleepy side. She wonders until she wonders aloud.   
  
“Castle.” She makes an obnoxious, hollow sound with her straw as she nears the end of her malt. “How did we wind up out late on a school night having ice cream?” 

He looks up from his sundae. He fixes her with that odd, searching look of his. “Why wouldn’t we have wound up here?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: See, sometimes it looks like a thing to the untrained eye, but …


	8. Confederate—Kill the Messenger (2 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His version of the story unfolding before them begins with him generously offering to take everyone out for a celebratory drink or two, and in the course of a pleasant, collegial evening, asking a perfectly innocent question. Her version has him asking the dumbest question in the world and unleashing a civil war between the boys. 

> _“Who did you ask to take care of it?”  
>  — Kate Beckett, Kill the Messenger (2 x 08)_

* * *

His version of the story unfolding before them begins with him generously offering to take everyone out for a celebratory drink or two, and in the course of a pleasant, collegial evening, asking a perfectly innocent question. Her version has him asking the dumbest question in the world and unleashing a civil war between the boys. 

“You had to see that coming, Castle.” The Captain, generally speaking, is on her side, but he at least thinks it’s an entertaining civil war. 

“How could I—?” He twists around in his chair and points an accusing finger in the direction of the opposing forces in question, who are currently engaged in the most aggressive game of darts in history. “I’m not the one who sent them to ‘work it out’,” he lets the air quotes land on Beckett’s shoulders,”with projectiles!” 

“Did it or did it not save us all from Ryan calling Jenny to prove she’s not imaginary?“ she shoots back. 

“She’s got you there.” Roy picks it right up. “Plus, no call to Jenny, no Esposito tattling that _he_ is her man’s Aunt Sally.” 

“Oh, sure,” he grumbles as he turns back to hunch over his beer. “It’s all fun and games and salvaged relationships until Esposito punctures Ryan’s lung with a dart.” 

“Your war, your casualties,” she says, saluting him with her own beer. “Like the Captain said: You had to know Esposito would be Ryan’s Aunt Sally, and Ryan would _not_ be Espo’s.” 

“Ryan, God love him, is no one’s Aunt Sally.” Roy laughs. The two of them clink glasses. 

“You never answered,” he says, cutting into their fun. It’s mostly a posture. He’s not _really_ annoyed at the alliance they’ve formed against him. It’s good to see them both smiling, even if the three of the are most likely going to end the night having to get Lanie out of bed so she can help them hide two bodies. “Who’s yours, Captain?” 

It’s probably stupid to push. He notes the way both their faces dim, the way they stare down into the rippling surfaces of their respective beers and upgrades that to _definitely stupid._ The whole point of the evening is to give them all a chance to breathe a little and do a victory lap on the occasion of their three-fer, but the question won’t leave the writer in him alone. Who is the one person each of them would trust to hold on to a box for ten years and never, ever open it? 

“I try not to need an Aunt Sally, Castle,” Roy answers at last. He downs the rest of his beer. “I try real hard, so I’ll never have to put anyone in that position.” 

The Captain pushes back from the table not long after. He stops to say good night to the still-squabbling boys, who must be playing best nine out of seventeen at this point. He leaves the two of them—him and her—at a quiet table. 

“Who’s yours?” she asks timidly. 

It shocks the hell out of him—the quiet voice as much as the question. He’d assumed she would have killed the question with fire, given half a chance. But instead, she’s toying with the drops of condensation skating down the curve of her glass and not quite daring to meet his eye. 

“Me?“ He’s deflecting before he realizes that’s the way things are going to go. “There aren’t enough Aunt Sallies in the world—“ He stops himself. Or, really, the way her face crumples stops him. “Alexis would do it. But I wouldn’t do that to her.” He sneaks a glance at her and catches the tiniest of nods. It gives him the courage to tweak her a little. “My mother would try to blackmail me …” 

She snatches up peanuts from the beat-up bowl on the table between them and pelts him with them. He presses his hands to his chest and rears back as though he’s just taken fire. She laughs and he laughs, and he thinks that’s the end of it. 

“My dad couldn’t do it.” She shakes her head.“He’d have to look. He’d have to try to fix it.” 

“And—“ He swallows and second guesses himself. It’s not just the writer in him who wants to ask, but he wonders if he should leave it. He decides to risk it. Tonight, over drinks, as they’re doing their victory lap, or embarking on a bloody civil war, or whatever, he figures he might as well. “And your mom?” 

“My mom?” A smile spreads over her face. Her attention is still fixed on peanuts and droplets and the fascinating world of the sticky tavern table between them, but there’s still a smile. “Oh, yeah. My mom was definitely an Aunt Sally.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I love Aunt Sally, though she has clearly never held knitting needles in her life; still—more convincing as a knitter than John Stamos. These observations are not things


	9. Consigliere—Love Me Dead (2 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s late enough when her phone rings that she knows it has to be him. She’s just not sure which version of him it might be. The phone rings once. She’s a little worried that he’s beating himself up over Scarlett Price—that some notion has taken root that his knight-in-shining-armor tendencies make him culpable in the death of John Knox. It rings twice. She’s prepared—sort of prepared—to talk him down from that, if need be. But she doesn’t want him getting the idea that they’re … calling buddies or something. They are not calling buddies. 

> _“When you kept secrets from your father, was it not a big deal?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Love Me Dead (2 x 09)_
> 
> * * *

It’s late enough when her phone rings that she knows it has to be him. She’s just not sure which version of him it might be. The phone rings once. She’s a little worried that he’s beating himself up over Scarlett Price—that some notion has taken root that his knight-in-shining-armor tendencies make him culpable in the death of John Knox. It rings twice. She’s prepared—sort of prepared—to talk him down from that, if need be. But she doesn’t want him getting the idea that they’re … calling buddies or something. They are _not_ calling buddies. 

“It’s late, Castle.” She catches it on the next half ring and tries to set her tone to neutral with a pinch of exasperation thrown in. “This had better be—“ 

_“She told me_ ,” he crows, and she pictures him kicking back in one of his enormous leather office chairs. _“She came clean over ice cream, and I am still the cool dad!”_

She has the strong urge to hang up on him. She thinks it would serve him right for being a brat, for thinking he can call her at all hours just to gloat. She doesn’t hang up, though, mostly because she’s … curious. 

Alexis asked to meet her with the pros and cons of her school’s program abroad in mind, but their conversation, in the end, had ranged pretty far and wide. They’d wound up in a tentative back-and-forth about mothers and fathers, what it’s like to be close and not close to them, how it’s probably normal—whatever that means when it comes to family—for closeness between kids and their parents to ebb and flow.

They’d wound up meeting each other in a new and surprisingly complicated way, as daughters who know what it’s like to have to play the parent—the burden of it, and the strength and perspective it can build—in their disjointed families. She’s definitely curious to learn how much of the conversation Alexis had actually shared, and if he suffers for a little along the way for the sin of smugness, well, then that’s just a bonus. 

“Came clean?” She kicks back herself, stretching her legs out long on the couch. She pushes no small amount of subtext into the two words, then decides it’s not quite enough. “So she told you … everything?” The pause is exquisitely timed. She hears the tell-tale creak of leather and his spine straightening. “That’s good.” 

_“Yes,_ everything, _Detective,”_ he says quickly. _“Your treachery is revealed. Or should I say …”_ His pause is more dramatic, of course. It goes on for days _“ … attempted treachery?”_

“Attempted treachery,” she repeats. She flirts for a moment with the temptation to fabricate some _actual_ treachery she’d tried to lead his daughter into—or some hair-raising scrape she’d gotten her out of—but there are simpler ways to torment him. “So despite my advice, she’s passing on a first-rate opportunity so her ‘cool dad’ won’t have to blow out the candles all alone? Wow, you win, Castle.” 

_“First rate,”_ he says, his tone suddenly flat and airless. _“You really think she should go.”_

It’s a statement, not a question. There’s not an iota of smugness in it, and as far as subtext goes, she’s out of her league. In just those six words, there’s at least two parents’ worth of absolute conviction that he’s screwing up his kid for life. She feels a pang of empathy, even as she fights the resurgent desire to hang up. She’s flattered that his kid had come to her advice, and touched by the way she’d opened up, but she’s more than a little annoyed that she’s let herself get roped into … whatever this is.

“I think she should make her own decision,” she says carefully. “And it sounds like she did.” 

_“But what if she didn’t?”_ He’s moving around now. She can hear his voice bouncing off brick, then glass. She can picture him pacing. _“She thought I’d freak out. That’s why she asked you and not me. What if she’s not going because she thinks I’ll freak out?”_

She wants to point out that he _is_ freaking out. She wants— _badly_ —to tweak him into oblivion, because he called to gloat and he deserves what he gets. But he’s pacing, and whatever he really does deserve, that _I am screwing this up_ fear is real for him. She glances at her watch. She wonders about the late hour and whether it’s the need for reassurance as much as the desire to gloat that moved him to pick up the phone tonight. 

“She had a notebook and a whole rainbow of colored pens,” she says finally. “She had a list of prepared questions. She took _notes,_ Castle.” She shakes her head, remembering the smile she’d had to tuck away at the earnestness of it all. “I think your inevitable freak out was a minor consideration at best.”

_“Notes.”_

She can’t tell if the echo is amused or appalled, or maybe a little of both. She can’t say which is more appropriate to the situation. 

“Color- _coded_ notes, Castle.” 

_“Do you think …”_ His pause this time is genuine. For him, anyway. _“Do you think she’s an alien?”_

“Possible,” she laughs. She sits up and makes ready to hang up on him for real this time. “Makes as much sense as anything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Aliens. Not a thing. 


	10. Troika—One Man's Treasure (2 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He begins his pitch while she’s all dewey eyed and softhearted at seeing Alexis reunite Anna Noles with her mother’s brag book. It’s not actually a pitch at first, so much as it is an offhand, thinking-out-loud kind of thing. It’s perfectly innocent.

> _“Did you ever think that maybe she made this up to take the attention off of herself?”  
> _ _— Helen Parker, One Man’s Treasure (2 x 10)_

* * *

He begins his pitch while she’s all dewey eyed and softhearted at seeing Alexis reunite Anna Noles with her mother’s brag book. It’s not actually a pitch at first, so much as it is an offhand, thinking-out-loud kind of thing. It’s perfectly innocent. 

“What would I see of Kate Beckett in her younger days if I happened upon your folks’ brag books?” he asks as she settles in with the paperwork on Lance Carlberg. 

She fixes him with a withering look that doesn’t so much _suggest_ the question is not innocent as it does smack him between the eyes with its utter lack of innocence. Using only her witchy powers, she reminds him of the words _plaid skirts_ and _knee socks._ He winces and regrets that particular tactical error from early on and realizes that this completely reasonable, completely innocent request is something he’s going to have to create a pitch for, because now he wants to know. Now, he is desperate not just to know, but to _see_. 

“Would there be tutus, Beckett? I am thinking there must be tutus, because otherwise … “ He pauses to take what can only and fully be described as a gander at her legs. “Otherwise, what a _waste_.” 

He gets no overt reaction from her on that, but he suspects the tutu suggestion is more in the _tactical error_ zone than it is likely to help his cause. But he’s not wrong. There really should be tutus in this hypothetical brag book. Still, he should try to keep his next guess well inside territory that’s less likely to lead to his untimely death by letter opener. 

“I know there were pony years.” He casually retrieves the letter opener from the cup on her desk, just to be safe. He traces a mental image in the air with its point. “If only for those tall, shiny boots and natty jackets. That whole thing—with the shoes and the coats that you’ve got going on?— _that_ is not an obsession that springs up over night.” 

That manages to draw a narrow-eyed glare. She projects not-at-all innocent thoughts directly into his mind about riding breeches and how tight they are. These are _not_ his thoughts. Or they _weren’t_ his thoughts, anyway, and this hardly seems fair that _he_ should be in trouble for the contents of _her_ dirty mind. But fair or no, things are rapidly devolving into a _better part of valor_ situation. 

“Maybe—maybe—“ He pushes clumsily to his feet. “Maybe I’ll just let you think on my ques—my perfectly _innocent_ question and you can share whatever you feel comfortable sharing in the name of research.” He backpedals most of the way to the elevator. “Maybe. Yes. That. Research.” 

He removes himself from the possibility of immediate danger. There’s a devil on his shoulder, though. He’s fixated on the question all evening at home. He traces out a timeline of her youth, and well, that’s depressing when he considers the fact that he was changing diapers when she was probably mastering power chords and getting her brown belt in tae kwon do. He retreats into image searches and dangerous inspiration strikes. 

He hits the Black Pawn website for shots from the book launch. He does a deep dive into his phone and comes to regret his penchant for snapping photos endlessly and never, ever deleting anything. It’s the wee hours of the morning when he has enough raw material to set to work. 

He painstakingly outlines the shape of her face and hits the snip tool. He adjusts angles and futzes with brightness and saturation levels to age everything, but not too much. He Frankensteins together nearly a dozen images, then kills some of his darlings to settle on the three best. 

He has to have the teen!Beckett Evita on the shoddy balcony of an obviously high school stage in homage to Nikki’s derailed theatrical aspirations. There is no point in denying that tennis star!Beckett is all about the flattering plated skirt. The third is just a candid of her in a crowd of friends with their arms slung around one another. The third is … sentimental. It comes right back around to the innocence of the original question. 

He strikes out early the next morning and finds a workable triptych frame at the Duane Reade where he waits impatiently for his masterpieces to be printed. His errand makes him later than usual, but it’s not as though he could’ve counted on beating her in under any circumstances. He climbs the stairs to the fourth floor and makes a hard right turn. He lurks near the men’s room, trying to get the lay of the land.   
  
By some tremendous stroke of luck, she is not at her desk. She is is nowhere in sight, in fact, so he darts out, and with shaking hands, sets the frame on her desk due West of the elephants. He even has time to do some minor rearrangement of her stapler, a short stack of post-its, and her tape dispenser, so the tableau looks a bit more organic. 

His mission completed, he strides away from the desk at speed and heads for the break room. He heaves a sigh of relief and goes to pull himself a well-earned double shot. He’s hardly had time to tamp down a perfect puck of grounds when something sharp pegs him just above the left kidney. 

“Beckett!” 

He whirls to find her brandishing the frame by its flimsy cardboard prop. He expects her to be seething. He expects the very worst narrow-eyed glare she has in her arsenal, but it’s worse. She’s smiling. She’s absolutely calm, and she’s smiling. 

“Castle.” She turns the frame toward herself and studies his handiwork. “Here’s a fun fact.” She taps a nail on the center image. That would be Evita, of course. “I know your mother. I know your kid.” She smiles wider and his mouth goes dry. “Just something to consider.” 

She turns on one heel. She’s exiting the break room before he can even speak. 

“Oh yeah? I could get to know your dad,” he calls after her. His voice somehow, does not actually crack. “I could call him. Chat him up.” 

She falters. Her steps falter for one fraction of one second before she makes the slow, dramatic turn back toward him. 

“Call my dad,” she says. She is savoring each and every word. She is calling his bluff, and they both know it. “Yeah. You do that, Castle.”   
  
Yeah. He’s never doing that.   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Things. Never. Done. No things. 


	11. Field Theory—The Fifth Bullet (2 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has grudgingly come to accept that the two of them are … something to one another. Maybe it’s the year drawing to a close and the fact that another birthday has passed. Maybe it’s Jeremy and Emma and their quantum state, or maybe she’s in search of a label that’s a clear and unambiguous alternative to work wife, because she is definitely not that. But she is, she has to admit, his something. 

> _“Who am I then?”  
> _ _— Jeremy Preswick, The Fifth Bullet (2 x 11)_
> 
> * * *

She has grudgingly come to accept that the two of them are … something to one another. Maybe it’s the year drawing to a close and the fact that another birthday has passed. Maybe it’s Jeremy and Emma and their quantum state, or maybe she’s in search of a label that’s a clear and unambiguous alternative to _work wife_ , because she is definitely not that. But she is, she has to admit, his something. 

She’s come to accept that they work well together, when he can be bothered to work, anyway. Their minds function in wildly different ways, but they run at the same lightning speed. She reins in his pinball machine of a mind with procedure, insistence on evidence, and a habit of tugging at the loose threads of a compelling theory that’s so well-practiced that it borders on reflex. 

He keeps her mind … elastic, for lack of a better word. He remembers details and conversational fragments that she hardly bothers filing away, and then they turn out to be critical. He pesters her with the persistence of the precocious child he must have been—the precocious child he still is: _Why would, how did, wouldn’t they?_

He tugs constantly at her sleeve. He pushes her past the point of the smoking gun, and it’s quite the self-reckoning to admit it, but in his insistence on having the whole of the story—always the whole of it—he makes her a better cop. She has always had the mixed blessing of a ready store of empathy to draw on in that part of the work. But with the work he challenges her to do—the work he puts in alongside her—she has more. 

She has answers when loved ones ask their brittle questions, not just _who_ and _where_ and _when,_ but _how_ and _why_ and _what could they have been thinking?_ She has a beginning, middle, end to work through with them, and for her part, she sleeps easier most nights, knowing she has offered them as much peace as knowing can impart. 

The strange affair of Jeremy Preswick is, in many ways, nothing more than a case in point. Jeremy himself knows to ask— _Why’d I do it?_ It’s been a couple of days, and he already knows the pair they make well enough after two days to appeal to their overlapping need— _I just think it’d be easier, knowing why._

But the plea is hardly necessary. She can’t sleep, and he can’t, and that’s another piece of this something that they are to one another. He _knows_ she couldn’t sleep, and it’s not just about circles under her eyes or a plaintive request for an extra shot in her third latte of the morning. It’s the fact that she is the source of _his_ sleepless night, as much as _he_ is the source of hers, because they aren’t simply complementary, they challenge each other. They make demands and they make good on them. 

She’s come to accept all that, but she also knows that work alone is not the whole of it. Jeremy Preswick has something to do with why that’s on her mind right now—Jeremy and Emma and the … something they are to one another.

She’s charmed by the story they seem to be embarking on. How could she not be? But the facts of their case give her pause, too. She is perplexed by the readiness with which Emma showed up, stayed, soldiered on, even through the long, terrible day that they all believed Jeremy to be a murderer. She doesn’t know how to reconcile all of that with the revelation that it had been a long, bitter year since the woman had even spoken to Jeremy. 

She tends to think of endings as final. It might be a hazard of the job or an artifact of her personal history, but she thinks in terms of full stops, not caesuras. She thinks in terms of boundaries and categories—this or that, then or now, over or ongoing. 

But here are two people who defy that at every turn. Emma is a walking set of memories and she is not that at all. She is in love with Jeremy and bitterly angry with him. She expects and does not expect so many things about the place he lives, the way he spends his time. They have not spoken in a long, bitter year, and yet their lives are entangled. Their singular story feels inevitable because they are … something to one another. 

She has nothing in common with Emma Carnes. He has nothing in common with Jeremy Preswick. She is not is work wife, his ex-wife, or a wife preceded by any other prefix or adjective. But they are … something to one another. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This did not want to be wrangled. Probably because it’s a wraith, not a thing. 


	12. Whilom—A Rose for Everafter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He can’t decide what Nikki Heat has to do with his bride. 

> _If you were going to make up a story, would you make up something like that?_ _— Kate Beckett, A Rose for Everafter (2 x 12)_
> 
> * * *

He can’t decide what Nikki Heat has to do with his bride. 

She’s a bridesmaid at first, of course. She’s had to spend a fortune on an absolutely monstrous dress he’s cobbled together from the tiny snatches of description he’s been able to wrest from her. She hates the groomsman she’s paired with, mostly because he hates the idea of her being paired with a groomsman. She has less than no enthusiasm for any of the rituals leading up to the wedding, and to her, the morning-of murder is a _deus ex machina._

He has quite a lot of fun writing her as the world’s most reluctant bridesmaid, at least for a long night an a bit of the next morning. But he knows the whole time that it’s play, not work. Nikki is definitely not a Friend of the Bride. 

Next, Nikki is simply Rook’s plus one for the wedding of an ancient history ex. That seems to have legs at first, because much to his surprise, it’s Rook who’s turned out to be “kinda slutty”—or turns out to _have been_ kind of slutty. He keeps trying to settle the question and not having much luck. 

  
He doesn’t have much luck with the plus-one scenario, either. Nikki won’t behave. She keeps being level-headed and annoyingly unconsumed by jealousy. She is almost entirely uninterested in Rook’s history with the bride, and he can’t really blame her. Rook’s history with the bride is … honestly kind of boring, at least the way he keeps writing it. 

He tries coming at it from a _Ripped From the Headlines_ angle. Nikki has nothing to do with the bride until a bridesmaid turns up dead; it’s only then that Rook’s _of-all-the-gin-joints_ connection to the bride is revealed. 

There’s no promise in that approach, either. It simply strands him in _Stranger Than Fiction_ land, and he knows the reader won’t buy it. And anyway the backstory keeps being doggedly boring. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl spend a few quite lovely years together. Boy and girl awkwardly and somewhat painfully outgrow each other. Boy and girl achieve closure over a nice murder.

It’s strange that he keeps getting nowhere with this. He lets himself write half a dozen trash drafts of Nikki and the bride scenarios: They’re colleagues, they’re rivals, they’re distant cousins. They’re third-level masons, Martian infiltrators, they’ve been in witness protection since preschool. Nothing works. It’s _frustrating_ because a murder at a wedding—a murder committed specifically to _derail_ a wedding _—_ is _s_ uch a great elevator pitch. But an elevator pitch all it seems to be, no matter what point of entry he tries. 

He appeals to her for help—the real Nikki Heat. He begs her to tell him which bride she hated the most by the end, which bride was her favorite. He pesters her with questions about inappropriate first dance songs and bad behavior—hers or anyone else’s, really, but hers especially, yes, please. She glares at him a lot and doles out information in parts per million and teases him with allusions to karaoke, to line dancing and drunken pleas to the DJ for one more round of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” For a time, she enjoys tormenting him with dribs and drabs, but she eventually loses patience. 

“Why, Castle?” They’re pounding the pavement on their way to an interview that will probably not yield much movement on the case. That explains part of her irritation, but not the lion’s share. “Why are you still on brides?” 

“I need to figure it out. Who this bride is to Nikki.” It sounds pathetic when he says it out loud. It sounds like a dead end. “Or Rook or whoever,” he adds lamely. 

“Maybe she’s no one.” She takes the steps up to their destination at her usual brisk pace. “Maybe there is no bride.” 

He’s poised to scoff—it’s a ridiculous idea that there’s no bride, that there’s no complex, painful history woven through the intricate murder plot. It’s nonsense to suggest that the damned bride is something to someone in the story. Except it turns out that it’s not nonsense. 

He thinks through the stubbornly, everlastingly boring history he’s tried to write a dozen times and it dawns on him—the history is meaningful. It’s painful and formative. It’s _important_ , but that doesn’t make it interesting if one is not the girl, if one is not the boy. It dawns on him that he is no longer the boy, Kyra is no longer the girl. 

“Oh,” he says as she lifts her hand to knock on the art glass set into the door of the brownstone their person of interest calls home. “Maybe there’s no bride.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Castle literally comes to the conclusion that THIS IS NOT A THING. 


	13. Bal Masque—Sucker Punch (2 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She stopped wearing makeup after her mother’s murder. After the funeral. It wasn’t mourning, per se. It wasn’t a statement. It was necessary, at the time. 

> _“But I don’t have to guess, do I?”  
>  — Dick Coonan, Sucker Punch (2 x 13)_
> 
> * * *

She stopped wearing makeup after her mother’s murder. After the funeral. It wasn’t mourning, per se. It wasn’t a statement. It was necessary, at the time. 

She doesn’t know if anyone wondered. Probably not, with her life so absolutely fractured, pushed up and out of the earth, newly and violently exposed. 

There was Stuy, and then there was Stanford. There was a standard-issue reinvention of the young adult self a continent away. Then there was … not Stanford. There was _closer to home, my dad, just for now._ And _just for now_ turned into _for good,_ and all through it, there was her face, mostly bare. All through it, there were no likely candidates to wonder. 

Lately—in the last few months—it’s been odd. She has envisioned being asked. She has conjured up _Such A Pretty Girl, If You Just_ conversations with guest-starring pestering aunts. She has staged a dozen drunken back-and-forths with college friends turning to her in the middle of a feminist debate to note, to wonder, to inquire why it is that Kate Beckett is not an easy, breezy, beautiful CoverGirl.

But the queries are entirely imaginary. Her aunts, in actuality, pestered her then and pester her now about eating, sleeping, being careful, and calling more. Her college friends never knew her in the heavy black liner days or the stretch of months when she applied a painstakingly mod cats-eye look before she would even consider sallying forth into the world. 

She wears the bare minimum now, of course—foundation, concealer, mascara. She wears enough that people don’t blink, confused, as though she is vaguely naked in the workplace. She does not wear enough to say her from Lanie’s teasing, but Lanie doesn’t know about the mod months, the days of shimmer and smoke. She doesn’t know enough to ask about the difference. 

If Lanie asked—if anyone _had_ asked over the course of so many years, she would not have answered. Not truthfully, anyway. She does not answer in these imaginary conversations, and she doesn’t understand the point of them. Her tongue stills, her throat closes. She is at a loss to explain, even though the memory of the exact moment she stopped is vivid. 

She washed her face the night of the funeral. She moved, numbly, through the accumulated motions of a life time as one does—as one must, even under the weight of unimaginable loss. She had moved her fingertips in circles over cheekbones and chin, forehead and nose. She had cupped water in her palms and splashed away the landscape of tiny bubbles. 

She’d caught sight of herself in the mirror just then, as she reached for the tiny pot of cold cream her mother always swore by for eye makeup. She’d caught sight of her mother’s face and nearly gone to her knees with the force of the resemblance she had never before wanted to see, to hear about. 

_You are the very_ picture _of your mother,_ the pestering aunts tended to say. She had never once wanted to hear it.

She catches sight of her mother’s face again now in the scratched mirror, in the shitty lighting of the locker room. She has scrubbed at it—cheekbones and chin, forehead and nose—with slithering pink soap pumped out of a dispenser with smears of Dick Coonan’s blood on the buttons. She has cupped water in her palms and cried helplessly into the rippling surface of it. She has, at long last, splashed away a landscape of tiny bubbles. 

And now, here is her mother’s face with its strong chin and high cheekbones. Here are her eyes, changeable with the light. The resemblance is pronounced now, with the filling in of her laugh lines and a decade of sorrow written on her brow. 

The resemblance is painful as she paints the bare minimum back on—foundation, concealer, mascara and a swipe of shadow, an afterthought of liner. It is agonizing as her mind replays the moment she extended her hand to Dick Coonan, _so sorry for you loss_ , and Dick Coonan had looked straight into her mother’s face and accepted her condolences.

She imagines, vividly, her fist smashing the mirror. She imagines her mother’s face fractured into a radiating pattern and her knuckles bloody all over again. She imagines. 

There’s a knock at the door. A soft, timid tap at odds with the fact that the door is opening, is opening, is opening. 

“Beckett?” A soft, timid question at odds with him, with all of him. “Are you decent?” 

She finishes the swipe of shadow, the afterthought flick of the liner pencil. She studies herself in the scratched mirror, in the shitty light. She studies her mother’s face. 

“Close enough,” she says, a soft, timid fiction. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: That thing you don’t do. (Except she obviously does.) But not a thing. 


	14. Volte-Face—The

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the months he has known her, he has, on multiple occasions, had the slightly panicked thought that he should switch up his strategy from time to time. He should, he thinks, mix in some charm and not so exclusively spend his time trying to get her goat. There are obstacles to this, though. 

> _“Do you even know what game I’m talking about?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, The Third Man (2 x 14)_
> 
> * * *

In the months he has known her, he has, on multiple occasions, had the slightly panicked thought that he should switch up his strategy from time to time. He should, he thinks, mix in some charm and not so exclusively spend his time trying to get her goat. There are obstacles to this, though. 

First, there is the slightly panicked state he more or less exists in now. He, a slacker of great renown, works _hard_ to keep up with her on the job, on the bantering front, at every phase of the game. Most days he feels like for every case-breaking flash of insight he has, for every perfectly crafted bon mot, she has, like six. So he panics and he pokes, practically nonstop. 

Second, it’s a pretty fun goat he gets, when he gets it. It is a delight to see her flustered—to see her legendary composure crumble and let the fierce and fiery Kate Beckett out to play. It’s a _relief_ to know that beneath the surface of this seemingly cool, untouchable woman, there’s a petty, playful, stupidly competitive girl. It’s a relief to him, and a relief to her, too, he thinks. 

He sees her take giddy little catch breaths sometimes when they’ve been sniping endlessly at one another, having left the boys in the dust, and he thinks she’s glad of the break it gives her. She _is_ the cool, untouchable, competent woman who leaves everyone constantly toiling in her wake, but he thinks it’s a relief to her that she doesn’t have to be that all the time. 

Third, he’s a natural at this. There are writers who hang back and quietly observe the world as it unfolds around them, and there are writers who are provocateurs. And then there is him. He has never met a personal button he could resist pushing, and she just has so many of them. What’s more, no one has dared to come near them in ages, so the slightest touch really lights them up. The system works and a big, panicked part of him is afraid to mess with that. 

But he’s revisiting the question of strategy tonight. He’s revisiting a lot of things tonight, or somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows he will be when he’s not utterly wrapped up in this—the wonder of Kate Beckett off the clock. She is a revelation. 

They’ve had their nights out before. They’ve had drinks with the boys at the tragic cop bar they like, and at places a step or two up from that if the Captain or Lanie is joining in. He’s tricked her into lunches out and quickly grabbed dinners at her desk or not. 

But all those occasions have been … continuous with the work day. They’ve been an exhausted period at the end or em dashes in medias res. This is—this has been all night—something different from the moment she slipped her arm through his and wondered _why not?_

He thinks at first that he’s just seeing the years fall away as she calls out her shake order before they’re even at the table, as she pulls her knees up and sits cross-legged on her side of the patched-vinyl booth. He thinks this is just a longer look at the girl he’s caught glimpses of, but it’s not that. It’s not simply that a strawberry milkshake and a heaping plate of fries she swore she wanted no part of bring out her playful side. 

She is expansive tonight. She is serious _and_ playful as they talk books and flirt around the edges of politics. She answers when he asks what she did and did not tell her dad about the death of Dick Coonan. She draws him out about his mother’s play and his hope, far more fervent and sincere than he’s usually inclined to voice, that it marks a return to the career that she loves and a reprieve from life coaching and other desperate endeavors. 

She is delightfully unguarded, and when he tries to provoke her about something—he can’t even remember what, but it’s nothing more than force of panicked habit—her face falls. She looks at him straight on. She takes a brave little catch breath and says, “Don’t, Castle. Don’t tease.” 

And so he doesn’t tease, not for the rest of the night, and it wears on. It grows so old that tomorrow is in it its infancy. He’s not particularly charming. It doesn’t occur to him to try for that, the strategy mix-up he is always, in his slightly panicked state, meaning to try. He simply loses himself in this. He keeps his eye on what he’s now dead certain is the prize—Kate Beckett off the clock.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: It’s a metaphorical goat. Not a thing. 


	15. Argot—Suicide Squeeze (2 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been not quite a year since she said it. She remembers the awkward moment in the throes of Melanie Cavanaugh’s case. She had worked up her courage for practically the first time to bounce a hypothetical off him. She had braced for him to gloat about it—the valuable perspective he clearly brought to the table. But he hadn’t gloated. He’d turned to her, wide-eyed, impressed, and excited at the break they’d just made in the case together. And even in that unexpected moment, she remembers believing it, whole-heartedly, not even a year ago—You speak Guy. 

> _“Why the sudden foray into the mysterious realms?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Suicide Squeeze (2 x 15)_
> 
> * * *

It’s been not quite a year since she said it. She remembers the awkward moment in the throes of Melanie Cavanaugh’s case. She had worked up her courage for practically the first time to bounce a hypothetical off him. She had braced for him to gloat about it—the valuable perspective he clearly brought to the table. But he hadn’t gloated. He’d turned to her, wide-eyed, impressed, and _excited_ at the break they’d just made in the case together. And even in that unexpected moment, she remembers _believing_ it, whole-heartedly, not even a year ago— _You speak Guy_. 

It sounds ridiculous now. Even over the headache pounding between her ears, it sounds like an absolutely ridiculous thing to say to Richard Castle, who does not, as a rule, speak Guy. 

Case in point: She has, in a headache-weakened moment, after several lifetimes of him pestering her about it, made a vague promise that they can go to a game in the spring. He has dedicated himself in the several lifetimes since that moment of weakness to asking every possible question there is to ask about baseball fields, the history of baseball, the rules of baseball, baseball statistics, baseball movies and whether or not they are better than the baseball books on which they are based. He has recently moved on to several categories of baseball-related questions that he is inventing on the fly. 

“You know Joe Torre,” she finally snaps. “You know Freight Train Tommy Zane. How do you not know this? How do you not know _anything_?” 

Her attempt at landing a devastating blow to his bro ego is a swing and a miss. 

“I know guys,” he shrugs, utterly unbothered. “Parties, charity things. And I do _read_.” 

“Not the sports section, apparently,” she mutters as she digs her fingers into the tight muscles of her forehead. 

“Strictly funny pages and gossip columns,” he agrees cheerfully. 

He seems, at last, to notice that she’s suffering, and the baseball questions mercifully taper off. But his choice of conversational tangent is yet another case in point. He goes on, at length, about his plans to drop the fact that Esposito has seen _Mamma Mia!_ into every possible conversation from now until the end of time. 

“Is it taking things too far If I sow disinformation about his deep-seated love for Abba?” he wonders aloud. “Because I have this whole backstory, like, boom! written all at once in the back of my head about how he’s this incognito superstar at Marie’s Crisis with his Abba deep cuts.” He looks up to see her digging the heel of her hand into her left eye. Out of her right, she sees that he has the decency to look a little sheepish. But only a little. “That might be taking things too far, though. I see that now.” 

He may see that it’s taking things too far. He does not, apparently, see that his own comprehensive knowledge of Abba’s entire oeuvre—and it is _truly_ comprehensive—might undermine his own pretensions to manly man-ness. 

Of course, he … doesn’t have a lot of those. It’s part of his lack of fluency in Guy, now that she thinks about it. He has _some,_ as an insistent throb within her skull reminds her. He is very much invested in making it, as often as possible, into the gossip columns he reads so faithfully, and far too many of his meandering—if helpful often enough to be annoying—insights seem to take a detour through a boudoir that does some pretty brisk business, thank you very much. 

But as he and her headache circle back to baseball, she has to admit that it’s kind of remarkable the way he just wants to _know_ things for the most part. She’s seen him hang on the words people from every slice of New York life, because he is simply hungry to know. 

She thinks about the dates she’s written off in the first three minutes when a guy’s need to explain the nature of manly things like sports to her in small words—in slow, loud English—manifested early. She tries to imagine any one of them asking her a ceaseless stream of eager questions about something that, even in the twenty-first damned century, still sits firmly in guy-land. There’s radio silence. It’s literally unimaginable. 

There’s a pinching sensation of protest directly over the bridge of her nose. The pinching sensation would like the record to show that Castle is an absolutely insufferable know-it-all a lot of the time. The court recognizes the distinguished pinching sensation from directly over the bridge of her nose. It’s true. He _is._

But it’s also true that he does not, as a rule, speak Guy. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oh, the not-a-things Richard Castle doesn’t know. 


	16. Nom de Guerre—The Mistress Always Spanks Twice (2 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes when he opens his mouth and the words of a jerk come out—and he freely admits that it’s only sometimes—what’s really going on is he’s writing out loud. That’s exactly what happens with Jessica Margolis and her Super Saucy Sociology research. Her advisor casually drops the name Mistress Venom and this is the stuff of his laziest and most self-indulgent writerly dreams. But he can’t exactly explain to the righteously indignant Professor Stevenson that the Penthouse Forum crack was self-directed. 

> _“Recognize this shade?”_   
>  _—Kate Beckett, The Mistress Always Spanks Twice (2 x 16)_
> 
> * * *

Sometimes when he opens his mouth and the words of a jerk come out—and he freely admits that it’s only sometimes—what’s really going on is he’s writing out loud. That’s exactly what happens with Jessica Margolis and her Super Saucy Sociology research. Her advisor casually drops the name Mistress Venom and this is the stuff of his laziest and most self-indulgent writerly dreams. But he can’t exactly explain to the righteously indignant Professor Stevenson that the Penthouse Forum crack was self-directed. 

But then Matt Jackass, ABD, makes an almost identical crack and he is consumed with—well, it’s not exactly guilt. And he’s too seasoned a Sayer of Ill-Advised Things In His Outside-His-Head Voice to even really be embarrassed. But he does experience a surge of … compensatory over-the-top interest in Jessica Margolis. 

Over-the-top is quite the trick in context. There’s _plenty_ to be interested in, right out there in the open without going through their victim’s psychological couch cushions, as it were. There’s the fact—which he happily and humbly acknowledges now—that she chose the research in the first place. She _chose,_ as a woman, no less, to professionally swim in a sea full of Matt-shaped sharks, and that’s both interesting and badass right there. Then there’s the bombshell revelation that she wasn’t just conducting her research, she was living it. 

His lazy, self-indulgent writerly mind could happily park itself right there for a good long while, but that stupid need to compensate for his own passing jack-assery insists on the couch cushions. And what he finds there isn’t so much salacious as it is sobering. 

Jessica Margolis, upon psychological couch cushion–examination, might have been the loneliest person he’s encountered in a long time. To Lady Irena and the cast of characters at the dungeon, she was just another working girl—in-demand, but maybe bending the rules, disinclined to share, and maybe doomed because of it. 

To her advisor and her grad school cohorts, she was either a scholar dedicated to unconventional work or a dilettante misdirecting attention and resources from worthier pursuits. The same was true even of her boyfriend/would-be fiancé, only there’s an even sadder story there. 

Jessica Margolis not only never shared with the man she’d spent a year of her life with _what_ she was doing, she never shared what drove her to it. She never revealed how troubling and difficult her life with Danielle was, and that’s not even tackling the fact that Danielle thought they were like sisters. 

It troubles him. He thinks of his daughter saying she’s bored with who she is at the ripe old age of sixteen—that she feels like she’s hiding. And he moves right the hell off _that_ parallel, because his lazy, self-indulgent, writerly mind might need a kick in the pants from time to time, but even it doesn’t deserve that kind of heart attack. 

And so he glides onward to recent revelations about Detective Beckett and all the fun facts she has at her fingertips. He’d like to dwell there a while, lazy and self-indulgent, but he’s still stuck in the couch cushions. 

He can’t help but remember how boldly she toyed with him in the safety of daylight, with Lanie and the children close by. It’s a far cry from the _so-bored-and-over-you-Castle_ eye roll she gave him when it was just the two of them and Jessica’s very, _very_ thorough documentation of Mistress Venom’s sessions.

He notes the precision of her language: “ _Vice_ raided a few of them,” not “ _We_ raided a few of them.” He notes the things her voice underscored, ever so slightly— _no sexual contact_ and _all consensual, perfectly legal._ He notes. He wonders and it’s not … _simply_ salacious. It’s _complicatedly_ salacious. 

Because she could just be punking him, though he thinks that’s the least likely scenario. She could be exactly as familiar with the world Jessica Margolis was studying as the late Mistress Venom herself, and she could be familiar with it in exactly the same way. 

But he thinks there’s another possibility. He thinks of something the Captain said about Jessica and Venom and the courage to get out of her situation. Detective Beckett, full of fun facts to know and tell, does not lack for courage in her daylight life. She’s very good at bossing men around—he’s noticed. But he wonders if maybe she’s familiar with that world in exactly the _opposite_ way. 

He wonders and he can’t stop wondering. He opens his mouth. It’s not exactly the words of a jerk that come out, just the words of a man with a death wish. 

“Hey, Beckett. Any chance you’re ticklish?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Pure speculation. Not a Thing. 


	17. Origami Forest—Tick, Tick, Tick (2 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her relationship with Nikki Heat is a complicated, constantly shifting thing that was supposed to be simple and eternal: She was supposed to hate Nikki Heat with all her might until the sun burned itself out. In her outward-facing life it is simple. It is eternal. She hates Nikki and her stripper name. She hates her dust-jacket nudity and her strategically held gun. Nikki Heat causes Kate Beckett nothing but grief. That’s the official story

_“Which one of you is Nikki Heat?”_   
_— Donald Salt, Tick, Tick, Tick … (2 x 17)_

* * *

Her relationship with Nikki Heat is a complicated, constantly shifting thing that was supposed to be simple and eternal: She was supposed to hate Nikki Heat with all her might until the sun burned itself out. In her outward-facing life it is simple. It is eternal. She hates Nikki and her stripper name. She hates her dust-jacket nudity and her strategically held gun. Nikki Heat causes Kate Beckett nothing but grief. That’s the official story. 

But in the busy inner workings of her mind—in her heart of hearts—things have never been quite so simple as that. The name has grown on her. It has the hard _K_ echoes of her own and she likes the terse way her alter ego deploys those three syllables. The cover art, in context, has a classic noir flair to it that she has to admit looks good on a shelf. 

But more to the point, she’s found from the beginning that she likes Nikki, with her blend of compassion and cutting through the bullshit. She likes her intelligence and the intricate workings of a heart that’s empathetic and self-protective in equal parts. She likes the way that Nikki talks and moves and how hard she works—how she is all the things he promised she would be.

She thought she had made her peace with her strange and secret crush on the woman who is definitely not her. She thought that her most pressing Nikki Heat–related problem from here on out would be to maintain the public–private divide on the issue, which is not a maneuver that she exactly has to strain herself to pull off. But then today arrived and she finds she is not at all prepared for the next phase of the evolution of her relationship with Nikki Heat: She is not prepared to be worried on her fictionalized self’s behalf. 

Worry doesn’t arrive all at once. She’s shaken by his abrupt announcement about Nikki’s impending arrival on the silver screen. She is annoyed with him for blind-siding her, but the official story is that she’s always annoyed with him, so, really, the only thing that’s new is the sudden development of her possessive feelings when it comes to Nikki. 

She is the very opposite of eager to play the Who Do You Want To Play You game. She digs her fingernails into her palms as everyone else preens and talks about their dream casting. She bites down hard on the inside of her lip and refuses to deal with the fact that it feels like an act of betrayal from every one of them 

But she knows that’s silly. She knows it will pass, and anyway, the movie Nikki will never be the real Nikki. So she’s not worried on her heroine’s behalf just yet. But then, there is the man on the phone. Then there is Jordan Shaw. Then there are two dead bodies and the promise of more if Nikki fails.

It’s then that she worries. 

It’s displacement. Or maybe dissociation? She really should have paid far more attention back in her unfocused days in therapy, but unfocused or no, she spent enough time in the chair to know that her present preoccupations are not what they seem. The murderer has presented her—Beckett—with murders it was her—Nikki’s—responsibility to prevent. Jordan Shaw, with her Manic Pixie Dream Agent tendency to externalize her interior monologue, expounds on Nikki’s many shortcomings from the murder’s perspective. 

And it hurts her. It’s a weight on her already overburdened heart and mind that the world will think Nikki is a failure if she—Kate—can’t stop this horrifying string of events from unfolding any further. 

It’s about her mother, really, as all things are. It’s about the deeply personal grief she feels for the survivors of every victim, and the damaging narrative embedded deep within her that it’s not enough to bring killers to justice, she should be stopping them. She should be stopping every single one. It’s subtext filtering up to become main text, as subtext fucking will when she’s least equipped to deal with it. 

She’s worried about Nikki and how the world sees her, and that’s not at all what she’s really worried about. But Sandra Keller falls through her door, and the talk turns to dogs. Nikki, as it turns out, is absolutely incidental to anything. She’s so irrelevant, it’s absurd to think of her as failing. 

And yet, she—Kate—is worried. In moments so fleeting that they might as well be imaginary, she is tearful, she is possessive. She is annoyed, and she feels betrayed. With three bodies on her conscience, in moments so fleeting they might as well be imaginary, she’s worried about Nikki Heat. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Not that this was ever a thing, but it might’ve been about exhaustion and irrationality if there were. (But there is not.) 


	18. Pendulate—Boom! (2 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is having a pretty good night. Day. Stretch of hours. Whatever you’d call his life post–Beckett’s hand dramatically appearing over the edge of her tub, he’s having a good one. It’s kind of awkward. Her apartment did blow up, pre-hand dramatically over the edge of her tub. And they are still hunting a serial killer, with indifferent success, who has just claimed another victim in what amounts to a fit of pique. 

> _“What happens in your version?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, Boom! (2 x 18)_
> 
> * * *

He is having a pretty good night. Day. Stretch of hours. Whatever you’d call his life post–Beckett’s hand dramatically appearing over the edge of her tub, he’s having a good one. It’s kind of awkward. Her apartment _did_ blow up, pre-hand dramatically over the edge of her tub. And they _are_ still hunting a serial killer, with indifferent success, who has just claimed another victim in what amounts to a fit of pique. 

He’s well aware that he has to keep his ebullient mood on the down low, but it’s no mean feat, given the run he’s having here. For one thing, he has very nearly seen a very totally alive Kate Beckett very completely naked. For another, the stars have aligned to afford him the opportunity to wrap that self-same very totally alive (and very completely naked) Detective in his coat and do Sir Walter “Vanquisher of Puddles” Raleigh one better by escorting her from a burning building. 

Furthermore, they have, together, quite possibly turned the tide in their search for the killer. They have unearthed a key piece of evidence—a general location that leads to an actual address, and at that address, his second villainous lair in as many days. The first lair had been exciting enough, what with its severed pinky and bomb-of-the-month-club kit sitting around, to say nothing of its hidden room. But the _second_ lair is officially outstanding. He’s seen some stalker collage walls in his day, but this one has real artistic flair. He would not change a thing about the stalker collage wall. 

And then there’s the writerly twist. The demented, room-sized mobile of typewritten pages impaled on sinister, oversized hooks knocks his heart around in his chest a little. He thinks of his own spring-clip and clothesline technique and the parallel sends a genuine chill down his not-so-easily-chilled spine. He picks up one of the thick manuscripts held together with industrial-strength binder clips. He feels the weight of it, and there’s another chill—another not so pleasant flash of recognition. 

It’s his first inkling that his mood might not be so much ebullient as it is … manic, but there’s not really time to let that worry him. They are to “un-ass” lair number two, whatever that means. It means, he finds, after a metaphorical swat on the nose with a rolled up newspaper from Agent Shaw, that he was definitely not supposed to tuck their killer’s latest opus into his coat—a different coat, by the bye, than the one so recently adjacent to very complete nakedness. That coat is going to need a glass case, a pedestal, and quite possibly one of those cool laser-array security systems. 

But he did tuck the manuscript in his coat, and swat on the nose or no, Shaw has left him to rifle through it. It is not good. It, in fact, _sucks,_ and that swings his mood right back around _._ The book, if it even deserves that label, is _comically_ terrible, and that just tickles him. He wants, badly, to read choice passages aloud in the back of the surveillance van, but he contents himself with scribbling them down, rather than disrupting the flow of conversation between the two very bad-ass crimefighters he happens to admire who happen to be nonchalantly discussing his loyalty, his essential contributions to the crime-fighting effort, and yes, his cocker spaniel–like attention span, but even with the run he’s having, you can’t win them all. 

He’s still oscillating between chuffed and giddy when Shaw bails to lead her team in pursuit of their guy. Before she goes, she orders Beckett—the target—to stay in the van. It’s a see-saw moment. It gets a gold star because he gets to grin and tell her now she knows how he feels. It pulls the rug out from under him because she is the _target_. The reality of that lands on him—the horror he has been pushing away since her hand dramatically appeared over the edge of her tub. It paralyzes him and then she’s gone. She’s running—alone—after the man who wants nothing more in this world than her dead. 

He waits, hunched in the back of the stupid van. There’s blood in his mouth from the door she slammed in his face. He silently bears the brunt of Shaw’s rage when she returns to find her op blown and Beckett gone. He is no longer having a good day. Night. Stretch of hours. 

She is the target. He can’t get the sentence out of his head. It taps out a fearful rhythm against the inside of his ribs. It gives him courage grim enough to stare her down in all her wrath, even in front of Montgomery. _You can, and you will._

She is the target. He gets her home—to his home. He plies her with hot cocoa. They banter. It’s what they do, but he’s embarrassed. He’s ashamed of his marathon giddy mood. He’s afraid of what tomorrow will bring. She is afraid, too. He reads it between her gallows-humor lines. He sees it, even as she tosses a napkin in his face signaling the final barb of the night between them. 

Something about he way he flinches back splits the inside of his lip open again. He grimaces at the metallic tang of blood. He must make a sound. Something pulls her back around. 

“You’re bleeding?” she approaches warily. She half reaches up, but her hand falls away. Pieces click together for her. “I did that.” 

“Well,” he mumbles, “technically the back door of the van did that.” 

She scowls at him. She rolls her eyes. Then she lifts up on her toes and swiftly presses her lips to the corner of his mouth. 

“Sorry,” she whispers, and then she’s gone. 

And he is standing there. He is having a pretty good night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Yikes. If only this were a thing, I could kill its AU terrible fluffness DED. 


	19. Contagious Magic—Wrapped Up In Death (2 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To the extent that it’s appropriate for a homicide detective—a servant of the people—to be up for a murder, she is up for a case like Will Medina’s. After Dunn and far too many days in a row with “the federal her,” after homelessness and a brief stint in his very rowdy, very crowded house, she is up for mummies and an unexpected behind-the-scenes tour at a cherished childhood institution. 

> _“Do you believe that people get what they deserve?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Wrapped Up in Death (2 x 19)_
> 
> * * *

To the extent that it’s appropriate for a homicide detective—a servant of the people—to be up for a murder, she is up for a case like Will Medina’s. After Dunn and far too many days in a row with “the federal her,” after homelessness and a brief stint in his very rowdy, very crowded house, she is up for mummies and an unexpected behind-the-scenes tour at a cherished childhood institution. 

She deploys her skill at taking in the background details of a scene, even as she’s conducting an interview. She stores up the sights and sounds of the bustling, dusty space with its enormous packing crates and delicate objects set in careful rows. She imagines telling her dad all about it when she sees him on the weekend and how they’ll laugh at the thought of her mom driving the team of scientists absolutely mad with a million questions. 

She’s giving Stanford Raynes most of her attention, but in the lure of her background world-building, she loses track of Castle. That’s never a good thing when she needs to round up a crowd for interviews. But there’s a fedora flying, there’s glass shattering and a very agitated mummy specialist before she realizes how actively _bad_ a thing it is to lose track of him here of all places. 

But for once, fate roughs him up almost immediately for his crimes. There’s a curse, and his shenanigans have put him right in its path. She’s kind of up for that, too. She’s _especially_ up for it—hell, she is down right _challenge accepted_ about it—when he takes a giant step out of character and suddenly scoffs at the supernatural. A well-timed paper cut sets the stage, and she is more than happy to take care of the rest. 

She feels a little bump of guilt when he goes down hard—tail bone–fracturingly hard, she fears—with the chair. But he’s being kind of grumpy and far less fun about this ridiculous case than he ought to be, and she ends up feeling sorrier for his already-sorry chair than for him. She ends up mourning the loss of one of the latte cups she loves more than his inadvertent display of his upper vocal register when he gets a face full of harmless steam substitute. 

She ends up annoyed with him, because even when the wheel turns—when she has revealed her own diablerie and the completely normal origins of his paranormal punishment, and he is suddenly the true believer—he’s grumpy. He’s on edge and not fun and she doesn’t understand why, when she’s really up for this. She decides to ignore whatever’s going on with him. She decides to revel in the _Indiana Jones Meets Small-Time Drug Lords_ of it all, all on her own. She doesn’t have much of a choice when he leaves for far longer than it should take him to change his damned jeans. 

They recover a little when he follows her down the _Scooby-Doo_ path. Without hesitation he informs her that she’s Daphne, not Velma, and he shows his work— _smart, hot, long legs._ She gets to scold him, and it seems like they’re back on an even keel for about two tenths of a second.

But then there’s the elevator, and he is vibrating with anxiety and disturbingly serious. He asks her to look after Alexis and her jaw just about hits the floor. Even though he tries to counterbalance it with a crack about shooting frisky teenagers and another about porn, he’s serious. She can see his pulse jumping in his wrist, in the confines of his collared shirt and she is _annoyed,_ because this should be … at least as fun as a homicide investigation can be. 

She’s out of patience with everything and everyone by the time Stanford Raynes tries to flee. The man wipes out on the highly polished marble landing and tumbles painfully down to the next. She watches with appropriate and sincere horror, but a small, irritated voice inside her says, _Serves him right_. 

Damned near simultaneously, Castle turns to her and says, “Still say there’s no curse?” 

It’s a joke. It’s meant to be a dry, witty bit of punctuation on the end of this absurdity, but there’s too much sincerity in it. There is too much genuine _worry_ , and it occurs to her that she’s being kind of an ass here. She catches Esposito’s eye and angles her head down the flight of stairs, a silent instruction to handle the collar. Esposito nods an acknowledgment. 

She tugs Castle out of the flow of sudden traffic by the lapel of his jacket. She pulls him around a right angle and up on to a short out-of-the way set of stairs. She sinks down to sit and hauls him along with her. 

“The curse was me. That’s all.” She dips her head. She feels silly, but she wants to look him in the eye. “You know that, right?” 

“I know that,” he mumbles, but he presses his hand to the front of his jacket, as though he wants to be sure of something. “But what if—“ 

“No ‘what if’.” She bats his hand away from whatever he’s fiddling with. “What is going on with you?” 

He mumbles something about Alexis. It’s slightly less intelligible than her first go at _mummified human tissue,_ but it’s enough to zz _ott_ her right between the eyes. She glances at the face of her dad’s watch. It’s stupid. It has no date function, but she doesn’t really need it. 

He’s just had a birthday. It might have been a big one with a round number. Or that may be a year in the past, a year in the future. He’s a chronic over-sharer in public and private, but for some reason his exact date of birth is a grey area. 

He hasn’t said much about it. He’s said absolutely nothing, in fact, and she’s not sure if he’s just sparing her, given all she’s been through lately, or if it’s him. If it’s a piece of the not-fun puzzle he’s been lately. She’s not sure if he’s feeling his own mortality as his kid grows up and away from him, if he’s genuinely worried about leaving her alone in the world. 

She’s just not sure, but it doesn’t matter. Her course of action is the same, either way. She grabs the brass railing up and to her right. She pulls herself up and, with difficulty given the sulking dead weight he is right now, him along with her. “Come on, Castle.”

“Come on where?” he asks, small-voiced, anxious, and more than a little sulky. “Where?” 

She stops a moment to orient herself, then strides for the basement offices, where they’re sure to find Rupert Bentley Scrooge McDucking his way through life. She thinks of all the ways she knows to leverage him. She thinks of Cacaw Te in her holding cell and the answers he no doubt has. She devises a Scooby-Doo-level plan.

“To break a curse,” she says firmly. She is so up for that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ugh. New depths of overly long not-thing-ness. 


	20. Agnate—The Late Shaft (2 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He had always liked Bobby Mann. It’s a thought that filters up among others that seem more immediately pressing, like the last thing the man had ever said to him.It’s not something he has the opportunity—the need?—to say until he’s calling Janine Marks for some reason. Confirmation of the truth every news outlet known to man is blasting—Bobby Mann, dead at 61. 

> _“Oh, so now you’re not denying it?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, The Late Shaft (2 x 20)_

* * *

He had always liked Bobby Mann. It’s a thought that filters up among others that seem more immediately pressing, like the last thing the man had ever said to him. It’s not something he has the opportunity—the need?—to say until he’s calling Janine Marks for some reason. Confirmation of the truth every news outlet known to man is blasting— _Bobby Mann, dead at 61._

 _You know,_ _I always liked him_ , he hears himself say out loud, and then—not out loud, thankfully—he wonders if that’s true. He’s done the show a half dozen times. He’s gotten the manufactured but undeniable thrill of hearing himself declared the favorite writer of late night’s elder statesman, and never once begrudged the literary guest before or after him for enjoying the exact same treatment. He’s not begrudging anyone now. He hasn’t uncovered some wellspring of resentment about formulaic nightly entertainment. He’s just not sure it’s true he always liked Bobby Mann. 

He doesn’t have to have liked him, of course, to want to solve his murder. That’s the good news, he guesses, about police work—there’s a clear path whether the victim was a sinner, a saint, or a middle-of-the-road schlub like most people. The bad news about police work—homicide investigation, at least—is that it necessarily leans into a victim’s sins in search of leads. So he doesn’t have to have liked Bobby Mann to be on the case, but being on the case fairly constantly raises the question of whether or not he did. 

The deck of ex-wife playing cards is quite a moment in that exploration. He’d _known_ there had been more than he could count on one hand. He thinks he even made a joke about it on some appearance long ago on a terrible suede couch far, far away. 

It’s a different thing entirely, though, to be confronted five-by-seven headshots and the absolutely regular pace of his “trade-ins” as Ryan puts it. Beckett gets in her shot about leases, and he finds himself on the verge of apologizing for his … species or something at that moment— _Homo semi-famousii._ But for all their smirks and eye rolls, neither detective finds Mann’s Marital Menagerie all that remarkable. They shake their heads and move on. 

That starts to settle the question for him. He doesn’t like that they move on so easily—that they simply expect such oily things of Bobby Mann and the Bobby Man-adjacent people of the world. He doesn’t like that he seems to fall into the latter category, and he does not like _at all_ the fact that these are things he would not have worried about a year ago. He wants to produce headshots of his two exes by way of demonstrating that they’re nothing alike, except, of course, for the fact that he could readily produce headshots of them both. 

He’s already decided that he did not, in fact, like Bobby Mann all along well before the Kayla revelation. He would like the record to show that, but he’s afraid that it doesn’t count for much. Beckett is—understandably, as he now understands—absolutely gobsmacked by the young woman’s naive insistence that Bobby Mann was in love with her. 

His own gob is duly smacked, but he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He understands and would solemnly swear that the possibility of Bobby Mann loving _anyone_ is nonexistent, but despite his own very recent epiphanies, he’s not sure he sees the sense in rather cruelly hammering that home for the young—very _young_ —woman before them. If she continues to follow in her mother’s footsteps, it seems there’ll be time enough for her to search her feelings about the Bobby Manns and Bobby Mann-adjacent people of the world. 

He wonders about her mother, quite miserably now, and if it were not wildly inappropriate under the circumstances, he wouldn’t mind a one-on-one with Janine Marks. He wouldn’t mind asking whether _she_ liked Bobby Man all along, or if she’s a woman in show business, well north of forty, who has been smiling through gritted teeth for decades. He wouldn’t mind a moment to set his hand on her shoulder and tell her that he would totally direct her to Bobby Mann’s corpse right now if it would not get him killed. 

But he doesn’t get a moment with Janine Marks. He gets Hank McPhee and his sleazy commentary about Kayla’s chances, sadly upended now, at being number seven. He gets Beckett’s complete non-reaction, and he wants to take her by the arms and shake her. He wants to shout that her skin should crawl and her stomach should turn and she should not just accept that there is a whole world where the only gauge—the only relevant metric for this kind of behavior—is what it does for the ratings. He wants to shout that she should _protest_. 

She does protest, unexpectedly. She protests about something mostly unexpected. She thinks he’s going out with Ellie Monroe again, and her reaction is _seismic._ She invokes common decency and self-respect. 

She is sputtering and it’s adorable enough—it’s touching enough—that he doesn’t actually push back. He doesn’t tell her that Ellie and he are he and Ellie and it’s nothing like Bobby Mann and this year’s model. It’s nothing like Bobby Mann pinning Kayla Marks obscenely to a backstage couch. 

But is it really nothing like that? Is it … adjacent to it and if he’d never met her—if he’d never stepped outside the realm of _Homo semi-famousii—_ would he be worrying about this?? 

He leaves her with a correction and slightly smug, knowing smile. He leaves her with a performance and a flurry of sobering questions filtering up through his joy that his daughter his coming home, that the case is over, that he knows, very definitely, that he never liked Bobby Mann one bit. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: 1. Not a thing. 2. Too long of a not thing, an I cut it down from something even longer that included rumination on everyone thinking it would be grand if Angel’s career were sacrificed on the altar of sleazy guy, and 3. OMG is this way too long given that it’s based almost entirely on the just-now-noticed really grossed out, offended reaction NF plays to Hank’s gross comment about Kayla maybe being number 7, and then his later assertion that Bobby was ashamed over Kayla—AS IF ANYONE WOULD HAVE BELIEVED THAT. But hi, hello, it’s 3 AM and I have no hot water and I have long since lost my mind. 


	21. Speculation—Den of Thieves (2 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s a private person. She thinks she always was—or maybe that she always would have emerged as one in her adult years—but it hardly matters now whether it’s nature, nurture, or circumstance that have brought her here. She is now, and ever more shall be, a private person. 

> _“So you’re here just to count coup, aren’t you?”_   
>  _— Victor Racine, Den of Thieves (2 x 21)_
> 
> * * *

She’s a private person. She thinks she always was—or maybe that she always would have emerged as one in her adult years—but it hardly matters now whether it’s nature, nurture, or circumstance that have brought her here. She is now, and ever more shall be, a private person. 

Given that immutable truth, there are days when she does not love at all the small, _small_ world that is the twelfth precinct. Today is shaping up to be one of them, because the moderately cute guy who was very _im_ moderately checking her out in the gym is not just a cop, which is strike one, he’s not just a cop from her precinct—strike two, given the aforementioned small world—he’s also an old friend of Esposito. Strike three, and isn’t that just _swell?_

She has a paranoid moment—a pretty long string of paranoid moments, actually, about this strange coincidence. It seems to her that strike three is a little _too_ swell just to be fate messing with her. She rewinds the Esposito reveal and mentally studies the tape of him going in for a manly half hug/half back thump. Was he _actually_ surprised to see his old friend? Was Demming, as the moderately cute guy turns out to be, actually surprised to see any of them, or is she at the center of a plot? 

Lanie, she decides, will be the real litmus test. She and Esposito are thick as thieves lately, and if there is a conspiracy afoot or a fix-up in the works, there is no doubt in her mind that Lanie has a blue-gloved hand in it. And sure enough, the second Castle is safely pressing his nose to the side of the fuming chamber, she finds herself on the receiving end of her friend’s most inquisitive gaze.   
  
“So what’s with the handsome robbery detective?” she asks, eyebrow climbing.

Kate deflects, of course. She downplays and flashes a dismissive palm. She sidesteps the handsome issue, entirely. Demming is _not_ handsome, she doesn’t think. He’s … moderately cute, and too boyish for the word, which a certain perennially vain writer has sort of burned her out on anyway. 

Her _more blasé than thou_ response draws Lanie’s most drawn out _Mmmmm-_ hmmm, but she can’t decide if that’s telling or not. She’s busily inspecting every single _M_ and searching the nooks and crannies in between to see if her friend is admitting guilt, and if so, how much, and of what nature, exactly. She’s still on the case, but Lanie is suddenly a target in motion. She is flashing a dismissive palm of her own. 

“But then again, you have been working with Castle for a year and not a damn thing has happened.” She walks away from Kate, grousing about betting pools and how much money she lost and Kate is unexpectedly staggered. 

_Not a damn thing has happened._

That is perfectly true. It is precisely, _forensically_ true that not a damned thing has happened between her and Castle, but she’s been hard pressed every day of the last year and then some to convince any denizens of the small world of this. She has been _especially_ hard pressed to convince the woman currently bustling around the morgue of this. 

She should be gearing up to crow about this. It should be a blessed relief. She should feel vindicated at last, and she should be taking this time devising a way to get Lanie to disseminate the perfect truth through the grapevine of this too-small world so she can have some damned peace and privacy.

But she examines herself. She looks inward in the the moment after Lanie’s grousing tapers off, in the moment before he, looking eager and boyish and unworthy of a grown-up appellation like _handsome_ himself, is furiously pounding the glass and pointing to his phone and a terrible picture they can’t possibly see. 

She is not, as it happens, relieved that Lanie has finally seen the light. It is not the good news she would have thought that all bets on her and him in this stupidly small world seem to be off. Instead, she feels questions for Lanie and no small amount of a feeling awfully like hurt bubbling up within her. She wants to know if Lanie bet on them having a one-night stand or an extended run of hate sex. She wants, in her smallest voice, to ask if anyone—anyone at all—would have bet on something more. 

She blinks at him through the glass. Her face works itself into a scowl—a counterbalance to the goofy, excited grin on his, and this doesn’t feel like a burden lifted or a truth revealed. 

It feels like squandered potential. It feels like loss.  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If this were a thing, I would reveal that it breaks my heart that Ryan—romantic little Ryan—bet against her taking him back at the beginning of the season. But this is not a thing, so I won’t say how sad it is that Lanie has given up on them. It is also sad that Beckett is not disturbed by Demming’s very weird chin. 


	22. Wolves—Food to Die for (2 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s fairly exhausted lately. It shouldn’t be a surprise. He has two full-time jobs already, and now he’s dividing his off hours between licking his wounds and fighting back against he milquetoast forces of Tom Demming. It’s confusing, which certainly contributes to the exhaustion. He’s not sure which is the legitimate course of action. He’s not sure either is.

> _“‘Something’?”  
>  — Madison Queller, Food to Die For (2 x 22)_
> 
> * * *

He’s fairly exhausted lately. It shouldn’t be a surprise. He has two full-time jobs already, and now he’s dividing his off hours between licking his wounds and fighting back against he milquetoast forces of Tom Demming. It’s confusing, which certainly contributes to the exhaustion. He’s not sure which is the legitimate course of action. He’s not sure either is.

Team Wound Licking had pulled ahead to an early lead. He has always thought—or at least he now tells himself that he has always thought—that they had an understanding. This idea is not without evidence. After all, the whole world either flat-out assumes or strongly suspects that the two of them are _Together._ It’s practically a bit at this point: Someone who has known them for one point six seconds tips their head to the side and lets the question trail off— _Are you two …?_ —and she tries (and reliably fails) to beat him to the punch. 

_Not yet—_

_—No!_

It’s practically a bit, except she wasn’t there to deliver her line when Darth Demming blindsided him. And given the highly intriguing, thoroughly entertaining _Little Castle Babies_ scene in interrogation, he is all but certain he wasn’t there to deliver his when Madison tried to make sure she wasn’t poaching on her old friend’s land. In both instances, it was a bit disrupted, and it’s brought nothing but trouble. 

In the interested of honesty, Team Fight Back insists that he admit that her answer, at least, has been maddeningly consistent, even if it is a lie. And it is a lie, isn’t it? 

Team Wound Licking’s answer is an emphatic yes. They may not be _Together_ together—yet, TWL hastens to add—but they are closer than any two people he knows who aren’t Together. They are closer than a number of people he knows who _are_ , theoretically, Together. There have been the kind of confidences and intimacies between them that people who are just friends don’t share. And there has been, for his part, an unwavering open invitation to resolve that whole _not yet_ issue. But has it really been unwavering?

The question mark belongs to Team Fight Back. This is is why Team Fight Back keeps falling behind—TFB is overburdened with stupid questions and finger pointing. TFB would like the record to show that while TWL has been sulking over the fact that he apparently merited not quite a week’s worth of gratitude for each time in recent memory he had saved her life, it has not been nearly so keen to get introspective about how it is that someone whose name rhymes with Schmellie Schmonroe factors into the “unwavering” equation. 

For this and many other reasons related to his fundamental distaste for working at anything that doesn’t come easily, his readily bruised ego, and his commitment to skimming the surface of life, TFB is pretty hard to love. 

And yet, he seems to be rooting for TFB. 

He spends the first harrowing moment of each day staring at his bedroom ceiling trying to blot out the insidious whispers of TWL, which would have him believe that his own lie to Demming was somehow _her_ fault—that he wouldn’t have traded stupid, false sports metaphors with that damp paper towel in a suit if _she_ hadn’t been lying in answer to The Question for more than a year. TWL would have him believe that Bachelorette Number 3s and Schmellie Schmonroes are obviously allowed, but Pin-Up Boys and Boy Scouts and … whatever Demming is are just as obviously not. 

None of that, he and TFB tell himself, is true or fair or right. More important, TFB tells him as he rolls out of bed and plants his feet on the floor each morning, none of it is _relevant._ He’s made his interest, intentions, desires, _hopes_ for the two of them clear to her, or he hasn’t. He betrayed something unwritten between them with Ellie or he didn’t, just as she is betraying—or not—that self-same thing with Demming. The answers to these questions don’t move him any closer to resolution or a course of action. They don’t move him any closer to what he knows now that he wants. 

Team Wound Licking—he sees it now—is interested in rules lawyering and self-pity. It is all about hurling accusations, making excuses, shifting blame, and throwing up roadblocks, because it is fucking _scared_ of what lies beyond a smug _not yet_ that started out as one of many possible things in his bag of tricks meant to get a rise out of her. Team Fight Back has to admit they have that in common—TFB is scared, too, but willing to risk it for something well beyond 

He’s really rooting for TFB. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Borrowing a title from a cheesy aphorism—not a thing.


	23. Le Fay—Overkill

> _“What if he didn’t care?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Overkill (2 x 23)_
> 
> * * *

They’re calling her the Belle of the Ball around the precinct—not anyone she knows, of course. Anyone she knows—anyone who knows _her_ —wouldn’t dare. The culprits are an amorphous, omnipresent _They_ , who have taken note of the suddenly omnipresent Detective Demming, Robbery. They have taken note of the sudden diligent energy and relatively good behavior of one Richard Castle. They have concluded that this convergence of events clearly comes down to her charms and crowned her the Belle of the Ball. 

She does not love any of this, not the moniker certainly, and not the total disregard for the fact that Tom—Detective Demming, Robbery—has had perfectly legitimate, perfectly professional reasons to be haunting the fourth floor lately. She does not love being held responsible for _anything_ about Richard Castle. She does not love the implication that this is some kind of a love triangle. 

It is doubly not that. Or quadruply? The math makes her want to scream, but the point is that no one in this scenario loves anyone. And she is not not some popular girl who gets a kick out of playing her would-be dance partners against one another. She is not—to borrow a bizarre literary allusion from this stupid case—some Scarlett O’Hara with her hoop skirts spread wide beneath a thousand-year oak tree, breaking hearts every time she smiles on one man and not the other. It just … kind of looks like that’s what’s going on. 

She knows better than to rail against Them—the shadowy figures who come up with these stupid labels and spread them around, who judge and speculate and stir up shit that’s none of their business. And even if she didn’t know better than to bite her tongue, what recourse does she have? How would she even hit back? Run an item in the precinct newsletter that no one reads protesting that she is doing her _job?_ She is keeping the Mayor happy. She is solving homicides. She having—or trying to have—a relationship with a nice guy who behaves like a grown up. 

Who _usually_ behaves like a grown-up. 

It’s background buzz compared to her fury over the bullpen buzz, but it has to be said: She has not been entirely thrilled with Detective Demming, Robbery, over the last few days. He has heard the whispers, of course. The whispers are impossible to avoid, so he knows that They are laughing behind their hands about tiaras and double-booked dance cards. But she’d hoped he’d ignore entirely or laugh it off. She’d hoped he would take it like a grown-up. 

He has spoiled her in the early going with his perfectly normal behavior. From the beginning, he had shown his interest and gauged hers. He’d asked her out on a date and demonstrated promising creativity when work interfered—and their work will always interfere. He’d given her an enthusiastic rain check, rather than sulking or clinging, when she’d opted for a glass of wine with Maddie. He has been the very model of normalcy. 

And he’s been _aware_ of Castle, of course. He’s thrown his share of wondering looks in the direction of the two of them, but up till now—up to the point of her being crowned the Belle of the Ball—he has simply proceeded with confidence. 

She _likes_ confidence. She does not like swagger and he’s veered dangerously close in the course of this case. He’s been very shoulders-back-chest-out, and his posturing combined with Castle’s smug digs … they make her tired. 

She has never wanted to be the Belle of the Ball. She still has the scar on the tip of her shoulder, courtesy of Maddie’s penchant for throwing things. That’s how the only love triangle she’s ever stuck around long enough to be a part of played out. She didn’t enjoy high school antics when they were age appropriate, and she certainly doesn’t like them now. 

Tom—Detective Demming, Robbery—seems to sense that at last. When she shuffles and Castle off to a room with Lisa Jenkins, and him off to one with Blake Wilder, there’s a shamefaced flash of realization on his part. There’s a short and sweet apology and a whispered _I know you’re with me. I’m glad you’re with me._

There is a stolen kiss that elevates her heart rate in a not-so-simple way. She likes kissing Detective Demming, Robbery. That’s not in question. But she is not at all sure that she likes kissing him in the middle of the precinct. She’s not sure she likes it in the middle of a buzzing bullpen, so she pulls away. She playfully swats at him and tells him she’ll see him later. 

But she sees Castle first. He’s trying to play it cool, but it’s clear to her that he’s agitated. He’s upset, and it’s not a posture. He goes. Castle goes with a swift _Goodnight,_ without a dramatic _Until Tomorrow._

Awareness percolates through her as if she is part of the buzz, as if she is one of Them. He knows about the kiss. He has possibly witnessed the kiss first hand. It has upset him, and it’s not a posture. She knows how the story will play out. She knows the story They will run ad nauseam: The Bell of the Ball strikes again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Imaginary tiara. Not a thing. 


	24. Pomodoro—A Deadly Game

> _“You’re telling me this is real?”_   
>  _— Hans Brauer, A Deadly Game (2 x 24)_
> 
> * * *

Jameson Rook’s greatest hits almost always wind up on the cutting room floor, quite possibly because the man mixes far too many metaphors for a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. From the moment the journalist first sprang into being, he—Rook’s avatar in the real world—had had to develop some entirely new writerly habits. 

He’d had to let himself write (and write, and _write_ ) pages upon pages of Rook observing and decoding every last gesture, facial expression, nuance of movement with absolutely fidelity. He’d had to let himself indulge in chapters that seemed like they’d never end, word counts that marched steadily into David Foster Wallace territory, knowing that he wouldn’t so much have to kill his darlings in the editing process as mow them down like a zombie horde post-apocalypse, most likely with some kind of heavy machinery. 

He has never in his life let himself waste so much verbiage. He has never in his life let a character have such an unrealistic, damned-near-omniscient understanding of another character—especially the mystery-solving heroine who is meant, herself, to be a mystery than can only unfold in almost imperceptible increments. 

But from the beginning, there’s simply been nothing for it. In the beginning the fountain of words sprang from that absolutely smug certainty that he had her number entirely. For—oh, a good week or so—he’d written every second he wasn’t at the precinct, convinced that he’d nailed her origin story on Day One, and the only thing he really had to hang around for was to wear down her resistance to his charms and maybe up his parlor trick game of reading people ever so slightly. 

But somewhere shortly after those four eternal minutes in a laundry room, convinced that one or both of them was about to be filleted by a distraught young woman with tragic taste in men, his nightly Rook brain dump turned the corner into curiosity, inquiry, wondering. Somewhere around Day Eight his confidence that he knew anything real or true about her—that he could ever learn anything real or true—wavered, but the words never stopped coming. 

Far from it, he’d had to develop _another_ new writerly habit—carving out strictly bounded stretches of time to let the Rook Cruft flow. He’d had to get an honest-to-Captain-Kirk tomato timer and throw his lot in with Reagan-Era efficiency freaks—twenty-five minutes of Rook for every seventy-five minutes of writing something someone might actually want to read. Someone who is not _him_ would want to read. He is a fan.

Doomed for the cutting room floor or not, Jameson Rook's greatest hits have been his guilty pleasure since the beginning. He has been an incorrigible sneaker of peeks—when the harsh tomato-timer taskmaster tells him he ought to be working on something useable—at the man’s endless store of loving glances, his moments of insight and adoration, his paeans to the way the spring twilight brings out the delicate pinks of her skin, and the dark, bristling beauty of hair slashing across her cheek as she sleeps. 

He has chuckled to himself in the middle of many a night as he lovingly dives in here, there, and everywhere, just for the pleasure of the illusion that he knows her, that he can. He has thought, more than once, that he really ought to update to his will. It definitely needs a section that dictates the publication of Jameson Rook’s greatest hits on the one-hundredth anniversary of his own death. 

He has read and re-read all these wasted words, though not always in joy. He has also gone to this secret store and endured the double-edged sword they had been all the while when she sent him away. He had found deep solace in them, and even deeper regret for all that he had been so careless with, the steep and terrible price he’d paid just so he could play whiz kid. 

His process hasn’t changed these last months since she’s taken him back. His writerly habits have not shifted. He writes a thousand words of Rook for every one hundred he writes of Nikki. He labors over Nikki, whereas everything through Rook’s eyes is like a torrent running through him. So he sets the terrible tomato timer to keep himself on task—to literally keep himself honest. 

But his relationship to Rook—to the words that still come easily, even when nothing else at all —has lately shifted again. It has painfully shifted with the sudden and totally unforeseen arrival of Detective Schlemming, who is clueless, who runs constantly afoul of Nikki’s hot buttons and boundaries, who hardly deserves to share the planet with her, because Detective Schlemming has not dedicated his life to decoding the barest twitch of her eyebrow. 

Detective Schlemming is a cruel kind of therapy. He is the world’s most obvious foil for Rook and all his between-the-lines understanding of Nikki Heat. He is so obviously the wrong guy, who reinforces Rook’s rightness. But by the same token, he struggles with what to do with Detective Schlemming. He struggles with what to do _about_ him. 

He wants to believe Rook would whisk Nikki away for a romantic weekend out of town, well away from this doofus who is stepping constantly on her toes and mucking up her life. He wants to believe that his fictional avatar _could_ resolve the situation with a neatly turned phrase. So he writes that phrase. He writes it, over and over _._ He hones the dialogue and practices it in the mirror. _You know what? You should come_. 

He lobs it out there into the ether. He cracks a joke about skinny dipping and he strikes the right balance between suave and funny. He thinks he strikes the right balance. It’s hard to tell with the pulse of his pounding heart trying to explode the bones of his skull apart. But it’s out there. That’s the important thing and they each smily slyly off to the left. 

He sneaks off to the men’s room once they’re back at the precinct and taps out dialogue and stage directions on his phone. He decides that Rook would absolutely play the ocean-view-patio card. So he plays the ocean-view-patio card. 

And somewhere along the way, she … succumbs. It’s not just a sly grin off to the side when they’re in the cafe trying to figure out who in the damned stuffy place might have arranged a meet with their victim. It is a three-quarter turn to face him. It is a “no bullshit” demand: _You’re seriously asking me to your place in the Hamptons._

He hears himself promising fun and no funny stuff. His fingers itch, as he imagines Rook reading the moment, intuiting that Nikki needs somewhat no pressure. He finds himself meaning it—no funny stuff—and being blinded by the insight that Rook, along with everything else, wants Nikki’s _friendship_ as much as he wants her heart and … the rather attractive vessel where her heart resides. He sees it. He understands. He relates. 

He would gladly— _gladly—_ spend a restful, no funny stuff weekend with her. He would gladly stay up until the wee hours talking with her, showing her that he knows her, he worries about her, he is over the moon for her. 

For one moment, she relates, too. Her posture shifts. She rolls through the curve of her spine and sinks deeper into as though she’s imagining a lounge chair floating on the surface of the pool. Her teeth find the corner of her lip and he swears he sees some kind of shy, tentative declaration at last hovering in the air between them. He swears he’s seeing her with something that exceeds even the clarity of Rook’s understanding of Nikki. 

He isn’t, though. He’s entirely wrong. 

She’s been lying to his face. She’s been previously booked for the weekend this entire time. She has been protecting his stupid, mistaken feelings—his stupid, mistaken certainty that he knows what she’s thinking, what she wants, who she really is beneath her Nikki-like hyper-vigilance and fierce sense of privacy. 

He has been a fool. He has wasted enormous amounts of time and effort, and the thought of every one of Jameson Rook’s greatest hits makes him burn with humiliation. So he packs up. He makes ready to leave and Gina presents herself as an ideal alternative to subtext, to allusion, to the unknown. He throws a haphazard collection of things into a suitcase and rolls it out the door. 

He does not bring Jameson Rook’s greatest hits. He brings not a note, not a printed-out page, not a digital file that’s bursting at the seams. He doesn’t bring the fucking tomato timer. He leaves it half hidden by the clutter on his desk. 

He locks the front door against it—every word. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wasted not things; so many wasted not things. 


End file.
